Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] Remove the present-despite-SKIP_WORKTREE class of bugs (for sparse-checkouts)

From: Victoria Dye <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2022 20:51:03 -0500

Elijah Newren via GitGitGadget wrote:
> (Maintainer note: This series builds on (v2 of) vd/sparse-clean-etc, because
> it tweaks one of the testcases added there.)
> 
> (Note 2: There was a previous RFC round of this series at
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/.)
> 
> Files in the present-despite-SKIP_WORKTREE state have caused no ends of
> discussions and bugs[1,2,3,4,5,6,...and lots of others]. Trying to address
> the big issue of discovering & recovering from this state has befuddled me
> for over a year because I was worried we'd need additional code at every
> skip_worktree-checking path in the code (and they are all over the place),
> and that we'd make the code significantly slower unless we plumbed a bunch
> of additional information all over the place to allow some reasonable
> optimizations.
> 
> This series tries to solve the problem a bit differently by automatic early
> discovery and recovery; as a result, it greatly simplifies the landscape,
> reduces our testing matrix burden, and fixes a large swath of bugs. And I
> figured out how to get the perf cost down to essentially negligible.
> 
> Changes since v1 (or v2 if you count RFC as v1):
> 
>  * now includes some fixes for testcases from
>    ds/fetch-pull-with-sparse-index (which topic marked its own new tests as
>    potentially suboptimal; with my series, the sparse behavior now matches
>    the full tree behavior on that test. Wahoo!). Note that Junio's version
>    of vd/sparse-clean-etc already includes ds/fetch-pull-with-sparse-index,
>    so no need to merge in anything extra.
> 
> Changes since RFC version:
> 
>  * updated the commit messages as per suggestions from Victoria, including
>    adding performance measurements
>  * renamed the new function to use a clearer name
>  * replaced the final patch with a different optimization, which is both
>    simpler and performs quite a bit better (the cost for my previous patch 5
>    was already decent in many cases, but had a few cases where the cost was
>    significant).
> 
> Quick overview:
> 
>  * Patches 1 & 2 add a test to demonstrate accidental deletion of
>    possibly-modified files, and then fix the bug.
>  * Patch 3 is the crux of this series; a small amount of code with a huge
>    commit message
>  * Patch 4 updates the documentation
>  * Patch 5 adds an optimization to reduce the performance impact of patch 3
> 
Betwee the RFC and this version, you've made the changes I was looking for
and answered any remaining questions I had. This series (including patches
1, 2, and 4 - I didn't have anything substantial to say/ask/add to those)
looks good to me.

Thank you for working on this!

> [1]
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
> [2]
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
> [3]
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
> [4] commit 66b209b ("merge-ort: implement CE_SKIP_WORKTREE handling with
> conflicted entries", 2021-03-20) [5] commit ba359fd ("stash: fix stash
> application in sparse-checkouts", 2020-12-01) [6]
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/CABPp-BH9tju7WVm=[email-masked]/
> 
> Elijah Newren (5):
>   t1011: add testcase demonstrating accidental loss of user
>     modifications
>   unpack-trees: fix accidental loss of user changes
>   repo_read_index: clear SKIP_WORKTREE bit from files present in
>     worktree
>   Update documentation related to sparsity and the skip-worktree bit
>   Accelerate clear_skip_worktree_from_present_files() by caching
> 
>  Documentation/git-read-tree.txt          | 12 +++-
>  Documentation/git-sparse-checkout.txt    | 76 ++++++++++++++----------
>  Documentation/git-update-index.txt       | 57 +++++++++++++-----
>  repository.c                             |  7 +++
>  sparse-index.c                           | 73 +++++++++++++++++++++++
>  sparse-index.h                           |  1 +
>  t/t1011-read-tree-sparse-checkout.sh     | 23 ++++++-
>  t/t1092-sparse-checkout-compatibility.sh | 41 ++++++-------
>  t/t3705-add-sparse-checkout.sh           |  2 +
>  t/t6428-merge-conflicts-sparse.sh        | 23 ++-----
>  t/t7012-skip-worktree-writing.sh         | 44 +++-----------
>  t/t7817-grep-sparse-checkout.sh          | 11 +++-
>  unpack-trees.c                           |  4 +-
>  13 files changed, 246 insertions(+), 128 deletions(-)
> 
> 
> base-commit: 48609de3bf32befb69c40c1a2595a98dac0448b4
> Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-1114%2Fnewren%2Ffix-present-despite-skip-worktree-v2
> Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-1114/newren/fix-present-despite-skip-worktree-v2
> Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/1114
> 
> Range-diff vs v1:
> 
>  1:  c553d558c2f = 1:  d50d804af4e t1011: add testcase demonstrating accidental loss of user modifications
>  2:  1e3958576e2 = 2:  206c638fa90 unpack-trees: fix accidental loss of user changes
>  3:  b263cc75b7d ! 3:  11d46a399d2 repo_read_index: clear SKIP_WORKTREE bit from files present in worktree
>      @@ t/t1092-sparse-checkout-compatibility.sh: test_expect_success 'update-index modi
>        
>        	# When skip-worktree is disabled (even on files outside sparse cone), file
>        	# is updated in the index
>      +@@ t/t1092-sparse-checkout-compatibility.sh: test_expect_success 'ls-files' '
>      + 	test_cmp dense sparse &&
>      + 
>      + 	# Set up a strange condition of having a file edit
>      +-	# outside of the sparse-checkout cone. This is just
>      +-	# to verify that sparse-checkout and sparse-index
>      +-	# behave the same in this case.
>      ++	# outside of the sparse-checkout cone. We want to verify
>      ++	# that all modes handle this the same, and detect the
>      ++	# modification.
>      + 	write_script edit-content <<-\EOF &&
>      +-	mkdir folder1 &&
>      ++	mkdir -p folder1 &&
>      + 	echo content >>folder1/a
>      + 	EOF
>      +-	run_on_sparse ../edit-content &&
>      ++	run_on_all ../edit-content &&
>      + 
>      +-	# ls-files does not currently notice modified files whose
>      +-	# cache entries are marked SKIP_WORKTREE. This may change
>      +-	# in the future, but here we test that sparse index does
>      +-	# not accidentally create a change of behavior.
>      +-	test_sparse_match git ls-files --modified &&
>      +-	test_must_be_empty sparse-checkout-out &&
>      +-	test_must_be_empty sparse-index-out &&
>      ++	test_all_match git ls-files --modified &&
>      + 
>      + 	git -C sparse-index ls-files --sparse --modified >sparse-index-out &&
>      +-	test_must_be_empty sparse-index-out &&
>      ++	cat >expect <<-\EOF &&
>      ++	folder1/a
>      ++	EOF
>      ++	test_cmp expect sparse-index-out &&
>      + 
>      + 	# Add folder1 to the sparse-checkout cone and
>      + 	# check that ls-files shows the expanded files.
>      + 	test_sparse_match git sparse-checkout add folder1 &&
>      +-	test_sparse_match git ls-files --modified &&
>      ++	test_all_match git ls-files --modified &&
>      + 
>      + 	test_all_match git ls-files &&
>      + 	git -C sparse-index ls-files --sparse >actual &&
>       
>        ## t/t3705-add-sparse-checkout.sh ##
>       @@ t/t3705-add-sparse-checkout.sh: setup_sparse_entry () {
>  4:  c74ad19616e = 4:  0af00779128 Update documentation related to sparsity and the skip-worktree bit
>  5:  e68028ebe0a = 5:  05ac964e630 Accelerate clear_skip_worktree_from_present_files() by caching
>