Re: [PATCH 2/9] Add flag to make unpack_trees() not print errors.

Daniel Barkalow [off-list ref] writes:

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
...

quoted

quoted

Additionally, if unpack_trees() returns with an error, but without 
printing anything, it will roll back any changes to the index (by 
rereading the index, currently). This obviously could be done by the 
caller, but chances are that the caller would forget and debugging this 
is difficult.

Granted, it is easy to forget.  But maybe the caller does not need the 
index?  Or maybe it wants a different one?  I'd prefer the caller to clean 
up, if necessary.

That's what makes it "gently" instead of just "silent"; it has no effect 
if it doesn't succeed. Longer term, I'd like to have unpack_trees() unpack 
into a separate index, which should actually be faster (since it doesn't 
have to keep shifting the entries in the index it's working on) and make 
this moot.

Absolutely.  That is the original motivation I did the_index
thing for.

But "re-reading" may not be quite nice.  It would defeat the
optimization introduced by the change to use CE_UPTODATE flag to
avoid unnecessary lstat(2) calls.