Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, Thomas Adam wrote:
> > git is a lot faster than cvs, but on a tree the size of netbsd or
> > pkgsrc any operation that has to scan the entire working copy takes
> > long enough to be annoying, even on a fast machine with plenty of
> > RAM.  And more such scans happen than do when using cvs.
>
> No, this just isn't true.  Git walks the DAG, sure, but it typically
> only ever needs to look at one or two parents for most operations.

This does happen, and it's very annoying.  For example,

  have a clean tree
  edit one file
  git add myfile
  git commit

While getting ready to do the commit, git will lstat(2) every file
in the entire working copy, apparently for the purpose of printing
a report about files that have been modified but not added.  This
takes about 90 seconds in my netbsd src tree.  "git commit -uno"
suppresses printing of the report, but does not suppress all the
unwanted lstat(2) operations, so it still takes 90 seconds.

--apb (Alan Barrett)