From: Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:18:31 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] Avoid doing extra 'lstat()'s for d_type if we have an up-to-date cache entry Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Here's an alternative version that just makes the thing return the DT_xyz > flag rather than the mode (and it returns DT_REG for symlinks too, because > it knows nobody cares - we only really care about "directory or not") Btw, I'm wondering whether this "look if 'dir/file' exists in index and is up-to-date" is really safe. We don't really verify the whole path when we mark things ce_uptodate(). Part of what read_directory() does is to find directory entries, and in the process things like "git add" will notice if there's a conflict with existing index entries. So if a directory has changed into a symlink to a directory, this particular optimization will actually hide that, I suspect. I haven't tested, though. But it might be worth-while to see what happens when you had a directory structure, and then do mkdir dir touch dir/a touch dir/b git add dir mv dir new-dir ln -s new-dir dir git status Quite frankly, I'd personally be perfectly ok with git _not_ noticing subtle things like this automatically, but.. Linus