Re: RFC: Flat directory for notes, or fan-out? Both!

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 11, 2009, 20:57 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0902112152270.10279@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>
In-Reply-To: <20090211200227.GA27961@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Hi,

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Jeff King wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:10:43PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> > > I wonder if we can solve this by introducing a local cache that is a flat
> > > file that looks like:
> > [...]
> > Or we could use an on-disk hashmap.  Oh, wait...
> 
> That was my first thought, as well. Maybe your original implementation
> wasn't so bad, after all. :)
> 
> I searched through the archive to find a list of criticisms, but I
> didn't see any. So I guess the problem was just a concern that it might
> end up too complex.

Nope, the issue was that it would take too long to recreate IIRC.

BTW I am no longer a fan of the on-disk cache; I think it is an ugly solution to a problem that should be solved without ugliness using a flexible directory layout in the note ref' tree.

I mean, we really can allow different directory layouts as Sam described, with a few benefits, and only slight downsides. If we support multiple levels anyway, the code to allow arbitrary splits is not complicated (see Sam's patch).

Even the merging should not pose any problem at all; we need a custom merge driver anyway, and there is no reason whatsoever why we should not just teach the merge driver to remove the slashes before comparing the filie names.

At edit time, we can afford to perform a check that is a little more expensive than it would have been otherwise.

Ciao, Dscho