Re: [PATCH 0/5] Start of a journey: drop NO_THE_INDEX_COMPATIBILITY_MACROS

[Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>]

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Jeff Hostetler <git@jeffhostetler.com> wrote:
> You may also want to look at unpack-trees.c : mark_new_skip_worktree().
> It has a local variable named "the_index" in the argument list.
> You may want to rename this to avoid confusion.

Thanks for bringing this up. I just made a local commit,
to be sent out with v2.

>
> Thank you for bringing this up and making this proposal.
> I started a similar effort internally last fall, but
> stopped because of the footprint size.
>

Yeah, I also have a bad feeling about the foot print, which
is why I asked if now is a good time to go with such a series.


> In addition to (eventually) allowing multiple repos be open at
> the same time for submodules, it would also help with various
> multi-threading efforts.  For example, we have loops that do a
> "for (k = 0, k < active_nr; k++) {...}"  There is no visual clue
> in that code that it references "the_index" and therefore should
> be subject to the same locking.  Granted, this is a trivial example,
> but goes to the argument that the code has lots of subtle global
> variables and macros that make it difficult to reason about the
> code.
>
> This step would help un-hide this.

Thanks for pointing out the actual underlying reason, that I was trying
to formulate. I'll borrow these lines for future cover letters.

Thanks,
Stefan