Re: difftool -d symlinks, under what conditions

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> The implementation of Junio's suggestion is relatively straightforward
>>> (this is untested, although t7800 passes, and can probably be improved
>>> by someone better versed in Perl).  Does this work for your original
>>> scenario?
>>
>> This is a nice straightforward approach.
>>
>> As Junio mentioned, a good next step would be this patch in
>> combination with making the truly temporary files created by
>> dir-diff readonly.
>
> Even though I agree that the idea Matt McClure mentioned to run a
> three-way merge to take the modification back when the path checked
> out to the temporary tree as a temporary file (because it does not
> match the working tree version) gets edited by the user might be a
> better longer-term direction to go, marking the temporaries that the
> users should not modify clearly as such needs to be done in the
> shorter term.  This thread wouldn't have had to happen if we had
> such a safety measure in the first place.

One thing I forgot to add.  I suspect the patch in the thread will
not work if the path needs smudge filter and end-of-line conversion,
as it seems to just hash-object what is in the working tree (which
should be _after_ these transformations) and compare with the object
name.  The comparison should go the other way around.  Try to check
out the object with these transformations applied, and compare the
resulting file with what is in the working tree.

Does the temporary checkout correctly apply the smudge filter and
crlf conversion, by the way?  If not, regardless of the topic in
this thread, that may want to be fixed as well.  I didn't check.