Re: Git diff-file bug?

[Drew Northup <n1xim.email@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 4:04 AM, Scott Batchelor
<scott.batchelor@gmail.com> wrote:
> Many thanks to all who have responded to my question.
> I have found that something is, indeed, modifying the inodes for all
> the files in my repository. Our systems administrator executes a
> backup using "tar" with the "--atime-preserve" flag. It is this flag
> that modifies the "changed time" in the inode, and causes gitk to show
> that all my files have changed.
> Thanks,
> Scott.

Scott,
We do that in our office @work. Perhaps this will help:

"core.trustctime
If false, the ctime differences between the index and the working tree
are ignored; useful when the inode change time is regularly modified
by something outside Git (file system crawlers and some backup
systems). See git-update-index(1). True by default."

(Quoted via http://git-scm.com/docs/git-config )

When/if I have problems I set that false.


(CC list reconstructed)

> On 28 September 2012 21:40, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> Scott Batchelor <scott.batchelor@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> I'm fairly new to git and am witnessing some strange behavior with git
>>> that I suspect may be a bug. Can anyone set my mind at rest.
>>>
>>> Every so often (I've not quite figured out the exact set of
>>> circumstances yet)
>>
>> Figure that circumstances out.  That is the key to the issue.
>> Something in your workflow is futzing with the inode data of the
>> files in your working tree behind your back.  It sometimes is a
>> virus scanner.
>>
>> "git diff-*" plumbing commands are meant to be used after running
>> "git update-index --refresh" once in the program and when the caller
>> of these commands (in your case, gitk) knows that any change in the
>> information returned by lstat(2) on the paths in the working tree
>> files since that call indicate real changes to the files.
>>
>> "git status" internally runs an equivalent of "--refresh" before it
>> goes to find changes, so after running it, until that something
>> smudges the inode data behind your back, "gitk" will not be
>> confused.

-- 
-Drew Northup
--------------------------------------------------------------
"As opposed to vegetable or mineral error?"
-John Pescatore, SANS NewsBites Vol. 12 Num. 59