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    Optimize symlink/directory detection · c40641b7
    Linus Torvalds authored and Junio C Hamano's avatar Junio C Hamano committed
    
    
    This is the base for making symlink detection in the middle fo a pathname
    saner and (much) more efficient.
    
    Under various loads, we want to verify that the full path leading up to a
    filename is a real directory tree, and that when we successfully do an
    'lstat()' on a filename, we don't get a false positive due to a symlink in
    the middle of the path that git should have seen as a symlink, not as a
    normal path component.
    
    The 'has_symlink_leading_path()' function already did this, and cached
    a single level of symlink information, but didn't cache the _lack_ of a
    symlink, so the normal behaviour was actually the wrong way around, and we
    ended up doing an 'lstat()' on each path component to check that it was a
    real directory.
    
    This caches the last detected full directory and symlink entries, and
    speeds up especially deep directory structures a lot by avoiding to
    lstat() all the directories leading up to each entry in the index.
    
    [ This can - and should - probably be extended upon so that we eventually
      never do a bare 'lstat()' on any path entries at *all* when checking the
      index, but always check the full path carefully. Right now we do not
      generally check the whole path for all our normal quick index
      revalidation.
    
      We should also make sure that we're careful about all the invalidation,
      ie when we remove a link and replace it by a directory we should
      invalidate the symlink cache if it matches (and vice versa for the
      directory cache).
    
      But regardless, the basic function needs to be sane to do that. The old
      'has_symlink_leading_path()' was not capable enough - or indeed the code
      readable enough - to really do that sanely. So I'm pushing this as not
      just an optimization, but as a base for further work. ]
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    c40641b7