Re: Unfortunate interaction between git diff-index and fakeroot

Elazar Leibovich [off-list ref] writes:

ignore unused information, such as commit
2cb45e95438c113871fbbea5b4f629f9463034e7
which ignores st_dev, because it doesn't actually matter, or

I do not think it ignores because "it doesn't matter".  st_dev is
known not to be stable (e.g. across reboots and reconnects nfs), so
it is a poor indicator to use as a quick measure to see if the file
contents may have changed since we last checked.  On the other hand,
in a sane (it is of course open to debate "by whose definition")
environment, the fact that the owner of the file has changed _is_ a
significant enough sign to suspect that the file contents have
changed (i.e. the file is suspect to be dirty; you can actually
check and refresh, of course, though).

commit e44794706eeb57f2ee38ed1604821aa38b8ad9d2 which ignores
mode changes not relevant to the owner.

And that one is not even about the cached stat information used for
the quick "dirty-ness" check.  The change is about the mode bits in
recorded history.

File's mtime is not recorded in the history, either, but we do care
and record it in the index, because it can be used as a good (albeit
a bit too coarse grained) indicator that the contents of a file may
have changed.  

The owner and group fall into the same category.