Re: git bugs

So I really prefer not to. But you can take it up with Junio if you think
it can be a big deal.

I began writing a patch but I abandoned it. I don't have much
experience with the code base and I'd almost certainly miss a bunch of
corner cases. Your patch seems to be the easiest way to go. I'm not
motivated to push pre-emptive smudging, even if it might be more
efficient. After all, how often does this race condition come up?

But I have a per-file flagged version of the index for personal use,
and it's good to know that it's a valid strategy.

Historically, we *never* did it. In fact, it was a big deal. These days we
do it opportunistically for "git diff" if we can, but making sure that it
all still works for a read-only access (think gitweb etc - the reader is
*not* necessarily the owner of the archive at all!)

I hadn't thought about this case. This is intriguing: why does gitweb
need access to the index? I thought the index was only to make
operations fast for users intending to make changes to the repo. Why
can't servers run stripped-down versions of git that don't bother with
an index?

-Ben