Re: [Census] So who uses git?

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2006, linux@horizon.com wrote:
> 
> At the risk of complicating something already very complicated, and
> possibly breaking on Microsoft file systems, that case can be detected
> by reading the directory and noticing that the inode number changed.
> 
> Would it be worth validating the inode numbers (which can be retrieved
> in a batch) even if you don't do a full lstat()?

I don't think it's worth it. It's the unusual case anyway, and it doesn't 
even really guarantee anything either (the person _could_ just have marked 
the inode writable - not understanding what is going on, he could have 
just done a "chmod +w" behind git's back).

Together with the fact that it might not work everywhere, and that I could 
well imagine that "readdir()" is slow on cygwin too (how does it do 
"d_ino"? Maybe it has to do a stat() to emulate unix behaviour?), I'm not 
convinced it's worth it.

I think the whole "assume it's valid" is a crutch - but if we do it, we 
should make it _really_ fast, because it's also useful for automated 
procedures that _know_ which files they touch. So we should make it have 
minimal impact.

		Linus