Re: Plugin mechanism(s) for Git?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 02:46:28PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 2:18 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> > Some features, like the index-helper, aren't quite so easy. One reason
> > is that its data needs to persist as a cache between multiple git
> > invocations. In general, I think it would be nice to solve that by
> > communicating via on-disk files, rather than a running daemon (just
> > because it has fewer moving parts). But that's only half of it for
> > index-helper. It needs to monitor inotify while git isn't running at
> > all; so it really _does_ need some kind of long-running daemon.
> 
> This *may* have changed in the recent versions of the series, but I'm
> fairly sure and for what it's worth to this discussion, that's not
> what the index-helper does. It's there to keep the index file in
> memory instead of reading it from disk.
> 
> It can *also* if you "git update-index --watchman" spawn a watchman
> daemon in the background, which is the thing that'll be doing the
> inotify calls and needs to stay persistent, the index-helper then
> communicates with the watchman daemon "what changed since X?" to
> compute a new index when requested.

Ah, yeah, you're right. Sorry for the confusion; I haven't actually
followed the topic all that closely.

-Peff