Re: Reverting an uncommitted revert

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> Related to this, I have wondered if it might be useful to have an "index
> reflog". If I do something like this:
>
>   $ git add foo
>   $ hack hack hack
>   $ git add foo
>
> Then the first added state of "foo" is available in the object database,
> but it is not connected to the name "foo" in any way, which makes it
> much harder to find. If we had a reflog pointing to trees representing
> the index state after each change, then it would be simple (you could
> look at "INDEX@{1}:foo" or similar).
>
> I don't know if the performance is an issue. We are writing an extra
> tree every time we touch the index, but in many cases you are already
> writing a blob.

It is not just "an extra tree every time".  For example, in the kernel
repository, one of the path that is deepest [*1*] (i.e. whose modification
affects the most number of trees) is:

    arch/cris/include/arch-v32/mach-a3/mach/hwregs/iop/asm/iop_reg_space_asm.h

If you modify this file and then "git add", and if you write-tree the
index at that point, you need to write a tree object for ".", arch/,
arch/cris, ..., arch/cris/include/arch-v32/mach-a3/mach/hwregs/iop/asm, 10
trees in total (if I am counting them right ;-).

If your cache-tree is fresh (and if you "git write-tree" every time you
"git add", that will make it stay fresh), you do not have to recompute
object names of other 1728 tree objects (they are unchanged) [*2*], which
should help somewhat, but the majority of time is spent in the I/O (and
perhaps slow fsync on ext3 ;-) of writing these 10 tree objects [*3*].

People like Shawn who work with Java projects, where the tree hierarchy
tends to be (unnecessary) deep with prefixes like org/spearce/jgit due to
the namespace issues will have bigger overhead than a relatively shallow
project like git.git itself.

[Footnotes]

*1* You can find it out yourself with...

git ls-files "$(
    git ls-files |
    sed -e 's|[^/]||g' |
    sort -u |
    tail -n 1 |
    sed -e 's|/|*/|g' -e 's/$/*/'
)" | head -n 1

*2* The total number of tree objects in a commit is...

echo $(git ls-tree -r -d HEAD | wc -l) 1 + p | dc

*3* write-tree with or without help from cache-tree in the kernel
repository with a hot cache (we are talking about running "git write-tree"
every time you do "git add" so the cold cache case does not matter) looks
like this:

$ l=arch/cris/include/arch-v32/mach-a3/mach/hwregs/iop/asm/iop_reg_space_asm.h
$ echo >>$l && git add $l
$ /usr/bin/time git write-tree
04bc92c40a5d0f0d44e162e140cb00964a52046b
0.02user 0.01system 0:00.03elapsed 102%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+6387minor)pagefaults 0swaps

$ git reset --hard

$ echo >>$l && git add $l
$ /usr/bin/time git write-tree --ignore-cache-tree
04bc92c40a5d0f0d44e162e140cb00964a52046b
0.13user 0.04system 0:00.17elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+5336outputs (0major+17141minor)pagefaults 0swaps

(The numbers are from my Athlon(tm) 64 X2 3800+ with slow IDE disks).