On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, Chris Mason wrote:

5) right before exiting, write-tree updates the index if it made any changes.

This part won't work. It needs to do the proper locking, which means that 
it needs to create "index.lock" _before_ it reads the index file, and 
write everything to that one and then do a rename.

If it doesn't need to do the write, it can just remove index.lock without 
writing to it, obviously.

The downside to this setup is that I've got to change other index users to 
deal with directory entries that are there sometimes and missing other times.  
The nice part is that I don't have to "invalidate" the directory entry, if it 
is present, it is valid.

To me, the biggest downside is actually the complexity part, and worrying
about the directory index ever getting stale. How big do the changes end
up being?

		Linus