diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/todo/use_git-mktree_rather_than_index_file.mdwn')
-rw-r--r-- | doc/todo/use_git-mktree_rather_than_index_file.mdwn | 29 |
1 files changed, 29 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/todo/use_git-mktree_rather_than_index_file.mdwn b/doc/todo/use_git-mktree_rather_than_index_file.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f02fafb08 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/todo/use_git-mktree_rather_than_index_file.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +When git-annex is updating the git-annex branch, it currently +uses a separate index file. This adds overhead and complexity to the code. +Especially when there are many files, the index file gets large and writing +it gets slow. + +It might be an improvement to use `git mktree --batch` to inject a +tree object into git, without using the index file. `git hash-object` +is already used to add the files to git. All that would be needed is to +generate an updated tree containing the new file(s), and then update each +parent tree up to the root tree. This new tree can then be committed using +`git commit-tree` + +The only thing I can see that might make this slow at all is reading the old +tree contents, in order to update it. This would need a `git ls-tree` for +each tree; it does not have a batch mode, so 4 processes would need to be +spawned when generating a tree that changes 1 file. For any repo that's not +very small, that's probably still faster than rewriting the index file. + +Notes: + +* The union merge code currently uses the index. No particular reason + it needs to; that's just how the code is written, and it might be a large + rewrite to change it. +* A new git-annex branch can be pushed into the repository at any time. + The current code uses the index to detect when this happens, and + union merges the new branch head into the index. Would need something + like a `GIT_ANNEX_HEAD` ref to do the same if the index is removed. + +Thanks to sm for indirectly suggesting this. --[[Joey]] |