Re: Race condition with git-status and git-rebase

Yiannis Marangos [off-list ref] writes:

process A calls git-rebase
process A applies the 1st commit
process B calls git-status
process B calls read_cache()
process A applies the 2nd commit
process B holds the index.lock
process B writes back the old index (the one that was read from read_cache())
process A applies the 3rd commit (now the 3rd commit contains also a revert of the 2nd)

The above sequence shows we are clearly doing it wrong.  B's taking
of the lock is not protecting anything from anybody.

We try minimizing the lock contention by delaying the taking of the
lock by B, but even if we leave it at the current location in the
above sequence, at least B must verify that the contents of the
index it just took the lock on still matches what it read with its
earlier call to read_cache(), which would make it pretend as if it
took the lock before it did read_cache(), before writing the
refreshed results back.

I think we have a checksum for the entire index file at the end, so
one fix might be to teach read_index_from() to read that and store
it in a new field in "struct index_state", and then make the
"opportunistic update" codepath to verify that the index on the
filesystem still has the same checksum.