Re: Supressing sorting of trees

> Shawn O. Pearce <spearce <at> spearce.org> writes:
> 
> > 
> > Sal Mangano <smangano <at> into-technology.com> wrote:
> > > I am using Git in a non-standard way and need to make a few twaeks 
> > > in my custom build. I have added a --nosort option to git mktree 
> > > which will suppress the qsort of the tree.
> > > 
> > > Will this break any other git functions? Are there any commands that 
> > > assume trees are always sorted?
> > 
> > _YES IT BREAKS GIT_.
> > 
> > You cannot do this.
> > 
> > A Git repository whose trees are not sorted according to the Git 
> > specific sort ordering is severly broken and most tools will fail 
> > horribly on it.
> > 
> > Almost all code which reads trees assumes the names are sorted in a 
> > specific order.  These tools perform sorted merges against other tree 
> > like structures.  If the names are out of order the merge will fail. 
> > `git fsck` will complain that the tree is not sorted properly. Tools 
> > like `git log -- foo.c` will fail randomly because they break out of 
> > the entry lookup as soon as they find a name that is after foo.c, as 
> > they assume the tree is sorted.
> > 
> > I could go on.  But there is no point.
> > 
> > Oh, and trust me when I say this, the tree sorting matters.  Long ago 
> > JGit had a bug where it didn't sort trees correctly all of the time 
> > and we had a devil of a time tracking down that corruption.
> > 
> 
> Thanks Shawn. I get the picture. 
> 
> Now, let's assume I am stubborn, crazy or both :-)
> 
> I can modify fsck to ignore unsorted and at the moment I don't care 
> about merging trees. If I hunt down all usage of base_name_compare will 
> that identify all code with the sort assumption or is there other places 
> as well? I can go > through the entire source to figure this out myself 
> but I need to get something hacked up very quickly and would appreciate 
> help even if you think I am nuts!