Re: [RFC] http clone does not checkout working tree

> On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > 
> > and quite frankly, it's rather possible that we should get rid of the 
> > "void *buffer" and "unsigned long size" in the tree *entirely*, because 
> > the above would likely be better written as
> ..
> 
> Side note: the actual historical context here is that "parse_tree()" used 
> to create that "tree_entry_list" of all the entries in the tree. So we 
> used to do things like
> 
> 	struct tree_entry_list *list;
> 
> 	if (parse_tree(tree))
> 		die(..)
> 	list = tree->entries;
> 	while (list) {
> 		...
> 
> so "parse_tree()" was something much bigger (and generated much slower and 
> less dense data structures).
> 
> These days, parse_tree() basically just reads the object buffer and 
> length. So it boils down to just caching the result of "read_sha1_file()", 
> but we have all those legacy uses that come from the old historical thing. 
> And to some degree it may have made sense to drop the buffer, but keep the 
> actual list of entries in that old model.
> 
> See commit 2d9c58c69d1bab601e67b036d0546e85abcee7eb.