Re: What's cooking in git.git (Nov 2008, #06; Wed, 26)

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Nov 29, 2008, 01:25 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.1.00.0811281938250.19665@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <7voczz4cfb.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, 28 Nov 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:
> 
> > Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> > ...
> >> In other words, unless there is more interest in that feature, enough to 
> >> generate a well-understood design before a good implementation, I'd rather 
> >> see this patch series dropped.
> >
> > Ack.  I agree with every remark made by Dscho, and also want to cry "wolf".
> >
> > I haven't had time to read the patch series.  Its big and intrusive
> > and I just don't need the feature.
> 
> Well, "me neither".  Although I personally think resisting changes until
> it becomes absolutely necessary is a good discipline, we also need to
> recognise that there is a chicken-and-egg problem.  When you have a
> potentially useful feature, unless people actually try using it in the
> field, you won't discover the drawbacks in either the design nor the
> implementation, let alone any improvements.

I just looked over most of it (skipping the generic index extension portion). It looks to me like it's introducing an extra concept to avoid actually fixing maybe-bugs in the "assume unchanged" implementation when used with files that have been changed intentionally (with the user intending git to overlook this change). Sparse checkout is essentially a special case of this, where the user has changed the working directory radically (not populating it at all) and wants git to carry on as if this was not the case (with a certain amount of porcelain code to cause this to happen automatically).

If there's any need for this to be distinguished from "assume unchanged", I think it should be used with, not instead of, the CE_VALID bit; and it could probably use some bit in the stat info section, since we don't need stat info if we know by assumption that the entry is valid.

	-Daniel
*This .sig left intentionally blank*