Re: [PATCH v2] Make git selectively and conditionally ignore certain stat fields

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

Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg@dewire.com> writes:

> Semantically they're somewhat different. My flags are for ignoring
> a value when it's not used as indicated by the value zero, while
> trustctime is for ignoring untrustworthy, non-zero, values.

Yeah, I realized that after writing that message.

> Another thing that I noticed, is that I probably wanto to be able to filter on the precision
> of timestamps. Again, this i JGit-related. Current JGit has milliseconds precision (max), whereas
> Git has down to nanosecond precision in timestamps. Newer JGits may get nanoseconds timestamps too,
> but on current Linux versions JGit gets only integral seconds regardless of file system. 
>
> Would the names, milli, micro, nano be good for ignoring the tail when zero, or n1..n9 (obviously
> n2 would be ok too). nN = ignore all but first N nsec digits if they are zero)?

It somehow starts to sound like over-engineering to solve a wrong
problem.

I'd say a simplistic "ignore if zero is stored" or even "ignore this
as one of the systems that shares this file writes crap in it" may
be sufficient, and if this is a jGit specific issue, it might even
make sense to introduce a single configuration variable with string
"jgit" somewhere in its name and bypass the stat field comparison
for known-problematic fields, instead of having the user know and
list what stat fields need special attention.

Is this "the user edits in eclipse and then runs 'git status' from the
terminal" problem?