Re: RFH: refactor read-tree

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Alex Riesen wrote:

quoted

Linus Torvalds, Sun, Jul 09, 2006 05:15:41 +0200:

quoted

The basic idea is that "branch1" should be your current branch, and it 
obviously is also expected to match (more or less) the current index. So 
you can do a merge by

 - reading in "branch1" into the index:

	GIT_INDEX_FILE=.git/tmp-index git-read-tree -m branch1

what is "-m" here for?

It means that git-read-tree tries to merge the current index with branch1.

Well, the current index always "merges" by just taking the timestamps from 
it. The actual _content_ doesn't matter for the single-tree case.

For the two- and three-tree case, "git-read-tree -m" will verify that the 
parts that got changed still _match_ in the index, but for a single-tree 
"git-read-tree", there's nothing to match against, just the target, so 
the only thing it does is that for matching index/target-tree entries it 
will re-use the index timestamps (and other stat info).

			Linus