Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-pasky-0.3

H. Peter Anvin
2005-04-13T09:06:35Z

Petr Baudis wrote:
> Dear diary, on Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 10:47:05AM CEST, I got a letter
> where Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk> told me that...
>
>>On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 02:07:36PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
>>
>>>I'd suggest making it [index] big-endian to make sure the LE weenies don't
>>>forget to byteswap properly.
>>
>>That's not a bad argument actually - especially as networking uses BE.
>>(and git is about networking, right?) 8)
>
> Theoretically, you are never supposed to share your index if you work in
> fully git environment. However, I offer some "base tarballs" which have
> the unpacked source as well as the .git directory, and I think you want
> the index there. Of course you can always regenerate it by
>
> read-tree $(tree-id)
>
> but I really don't want to (hey, dwmw got away with that too! ;-). It
> forces an additional out-of-order step you need to do before making use
> of your git for the first time.
>
> The NFS argument obviously seems perfectly valid to me too. So, FWIW,
> I'm personally all for it, if someone gives me a patch.
>

In userspace, it's definitely easier to stick with BE for a standard
byte order, simply because it's the one byteorder one can rely on there
being macros available to deal with on all platforms.

However, then I would also like to suggest replacing "unsigned int" and
"unsigned short" with uint32_t and uint16_t, even though they're
consistent on all *current* Linux platforms.

-hpa