Re: [PATCH 0/8] Add 'ls-files --json' to dump the index in json

[Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>]

On 6/19/2019 5:58 AM, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:
> This is probably just my itch. Every time I have to do something with
> the index, I need to add a little bit code here, a little bit there to
> get a better "view" of the index.
> 
> This solves it for me. It allows me to see pretty much everything in the
> index (except really low detail stuff like pathname compression). It's
> readable by human, but also easy to parse if you need to do statistics
> and stuff. You could even do a "diff" between two indexes.
> 
> I'm not really sure if anybody else finds this useful. Because if not,
> I guess there's not much point trying to merge it to git.git just for a
> single user. Maintaining off tree is still a pain for me, but I think
> I can manage it.

I think we (Microsoft/VFS for Git engineers) would use this tool, as we
frequently need to diagnose something that went wrong in a user's index.
Kevin Willford built a tool to search the index and figure out what's
going on, but I'm not sure it parses all of the new extensions or was
updated to parse the v5 index.

Having a translation from the internal index format to an easier-to-parse
format is valuable.

Thanks,
-Stolee