Yiannis Marangos authored Apr 10, 2014 and Junio C Hamano committed Apr 10, 2014

Before we proceed to opportunistically update the index (often done
by an otherwise read-only operation like "git status" and "git diff"
that internally refreshes the index), we must verify that the
current index file is the same as the one that we read earlier
before we took the lock on it, in order to avoid a possible race.

In the example below git-status does "opportunistic update" and
git-rebase updates the index, but the race can happen in general.

  1. process A calls git-rebase (or does anything that uses the index)

  2. process A applies 1st commit

  3. process B calls git-status (or does anything that updates the index)

  4. process B reads index

  5. process A applies 2nd commit

  6. process B takes the lock, then overwrites process A's changes.

  7. process A applies 3rd commit

As an end result the 3rd commit will have a revert of the 2nd commit.
When process B takes the lock, it needs to make sure that the index
hasn't changed since step 4.

Signed-off-by: Yiannis Marangos <yiannis.marangos@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>