Re: 'setup_work_tree()' considered harmful

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> [ Dscho cc'd because I think he is the primary culprits for this thing, I 
>   think. Commit e90fdc39b6903502192b2dd11e5503cea721a1ad in particular, 
>   methinks. ]

Yes, I am not happy with work-tree.  In fact, I grew to positively hate 
it.  IMHO it was not well designed when it entered Git, and unfortunately 
my endeavors to clean it up were not very successful, either.

> [...]
>
> In particular, doing a "git add ." will use absolute pathnames for all 
> git files, while a "git diff" will not. And this is quite noticeable - 
> the absolute pathnames are not just longer, they have more path 
> components in them. Making them a lot slower to look up and use.
> 
> [...]
> 
> In general, I think we've gone in the wrong direction with a lot of the 
> "make_absolute_path" stuff. See above. 5% performance loss is not good.

Yes, that is true.  However, I think we need it for the case where 
work_tree is set (technically, we could try to be clever when work_tree is 
set in such a manner that we can operate with relative paths, but I think 
that is just not worth it).

So I am thinking about reverting to the old behavior, but _just_ for the 
common case that no work tree was set.

This might be more tricky than it used to be, because of the many special 
cases work trees require.

I briefly considered working on this now, but I simply do not have the 
time, and I seem to be unconcentrated these days.  Probably the best thing 
would be to scrap the whole work-tree thing and throw it out, admitting 
that it was a mistake to begin with.

Ciao,
Dscho