From: Linus Torvalds Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:45:26 GMT Subject: Re: Not going beyond symbolic links Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <7vod43b519.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > Seeing that you applied my arch/powerpc/.gitignore patch to the kernel > (Yaay, I now have a short-log entry in the kernel history ;-), you have > seen the message with some benchmarks I am replying to as well? Yes, I just felt that closed the discussion. I only brought up the issue in the first place because I worried about the performance impact. And I was unhappy about how that worry was dismissed as being less important than some specious "correctness" issue (for the last 3+ years, performance has mattered a _lot_, and the claimed big "correctness" issue has not mattered one whit). The thing is, sometimes "pi = 3.14" is (a) infinitely faster than the "correct" answer and (b) the difference between the "correct" and the "wrong" answer is meaningless. And this is why I get upset when somebody dismisses performance issues based on "correctness". The thing is, some specious value of "correctness" is often irrelevant because it doesn't matter. While performance almost _always_ matters. And I absolutely _detest_ the fact that people so often dismiss performance concerns so readily. But once the performance numbers are in and they don't show any issues, I think that simply settles the original query, and I'm happy. Linus