Re: What's cooking in git.git (Mar 2014, #02; Tue, 11)

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 03:12:11PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> * jk/warn-on-object-refname-ambiguity (2014-01-09) 6 commits
>  - get_sha1: drop object/refname ambiguity flag
>  - get_sha1: speed up ambiguous 40-hex test
>  - FIXUP: teach DO_FOR_EACH_NO_RECURSE to prime_ref_dir()
>  - refs: teach for_each_ref a flag to avoid recursion
>  - cat-file: fix a minor memory leak in batch_objects
>  - cat-file: refactor error handling of batch_objects
> 
>  Expecting a reroll.

I finally got a chance to return to this one. Michael had some good
comments on the refactoring that was going on in the middle patches. He
ended with:

  Yes.  Still, the code is really piling up for this one warning for the
  contrived eventuality that somebody wants to pass SHA-1s and branch
  names together in a single cat-file invocation *and* wants to pass
  lots of inputs at once and so is worried about performance *and* has
  reference names that look like SHA-1s.  Otherwise we could just leave
  the warning disabled in this case, as now.  Or we could add a new
  "--hashes-only" option that tells cat-file to treat all of its
  arguments/inputs as SHA-1s; such an option would permit an even faster
  code path for bulk callers.

Having looked at it again, I really think it is not worth pursuing. The
end goal is not that interesting, there is a lot of code introduced, and
a reasonable chance of accidentally introducing regressions and/or
making the code less maintainable.  Keeping the existing code (which
just disables the check for cat-file) is probably the sanest course of
action. We can do a similar thing for "rev-list --stdin" if we want, or
we can wait until somebody complains.

The bottom two patches are reasonable cleanups we should keep, though
(and the rest can just be discarded).

-Peff