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    diff: do not use null sha1 as a sentinel value · e5450100
    Jeff King authored and Junio C Hamano's avatar Junio C Hamano committed
    
    
    The diff code represents paths using the diff_filespec
    struct. This struct has a sha1 to represent the sha1 of the
    content at that path, as well as a sha1_valid member which
    indicates whether its sha1 field is actually useful. If
    sha1_valid is not true, then the filespec represents a
    working tree file (e.g., for the no-index case, or for when
    the index is not up-to-date).
    
    The diff_filespec is only used internally, though. At the
    interfaces to the diff subsystem, callers feed the sha1
    directly, and we create a diff_filespec from it. It's at
    that point that we look at the sha1 and decide whether it is
    valid or not; callers may pass the null sha1 as a sentinel
    value to indicate that it is not.
    
    We should not typically see the null sha1 coming from any
    other source (e.g., in the index itself, or from a tree).
    However, a corrupt tree might have a null sha1, which would
    cause "diff --patch" to accidentally diff the working tree
    version of a file instead of treating it as a blob.
    
    This patch extends the edges of the diff interface to accept
    a "sha1_valid" flag whenever we accept a sha1, and to use
    that flag when creating a filespec. In some cases, this
    means passing the flag through several layers, making the
    code change larger than would be desirable.
    
    One alternative would be to simply die() upon seeing
    corrupted trees with null sha1s. However, this fix more
    directly addresses the problem (while bogus sha1s in a tree
    are probably a bad thing, it is really the sentinel
    confusion sending us down the wrong code path that is what
    makes it devastating). And it means that git is more capable
    of examining and debugging these corrupted trees. For
    example, you can still "diff --raw" such a tree to find out
    when the bogus entry was introduced; you just cannot do a
    "--patch" diff (just as you could not with any other
    corrupted tree, as we do not have any content to diff).
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJeff King <peff@peff.net>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    e5450100