[ please don't prune the CC list; I've re-added Björn ] On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 16:09, Alexander Toresson<alexander.toresson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 2009/7/5 Matt Pearson <404emailnotfound@xxxxxxxxx>: >> 2009/7/5 Björn Steinbrink <B.Steinbrink@xxxxxx>: >>> On 2009.07.05 19:37:44 +0200, Alexander Toresson wrote: >>>> Hello, >>>> >>>> I've got problems with git diff, it hangs in an infinite loop when >>>> attempting to generate a diff between two specific commits. Commands >>>> to reproduce: >>>> >>>> git clone git://eulex.zapto.org/nightfall.git >>>> cd nightfall >>>> git diff --stat 597711..61a139 >>>> >>>> (Note that the clone needs to fetch 16mb) >>>> >>>> I'm running git 1.6.3.3. >>> >>> FWIW, it "hangs" on the save.xml file. The old version is 1.2M, the new >>> one is 9M. Using the patience diff algorithm to compare them takes about >>> 5 seconds here, while the default algorithm took 6m15s. >> >> I can confirm this for the 1.6.0.4 shipped with Ubuntu Jaunty (so this >> would seem to not be a recent change). Actually, it may be worse: mine >> is still running after 8 minutes, and this machine is almost >> brand-new. Normal diff -u on the two versions of the file finishes in >> under a second. >> >> On an unrelated note, it's usually a bad idea to have files like >> configure and *.suo in the repo (and possibly this save.xml as well). >> > > Ah! I shouldn't really have had that file in version control, I can > understand that it would be slow to diff a 9mb xml file. On the other > hand, is there a way to mark the file so git won't attempt to diff it, > but will just dispose of the old contents and use the new contents? > > As for the configure file, it's convenient for users to not have to > have autoconf installed to build it. I don't really know what *.suo > does nor do I think I added it, so I'll check up on that. > > Thank you. Slow is a relative term; Git is still taking several orders of magnitude longer than it should even on such a large file (it takes over 10 times as long as diffing v2.6.11 to HEAD on the kernel tree, and that patch is ~400 MB). Plus, as I noted above, GNU diff can do it in less than a second. You can disable diffing by adding the following line to .gitattributes (see gitattributes(5)): save.xml -diff Having the configure script in the repo pollutes the diffs. Anybody who's going to check a project out of source control (instead of using a tarball) will not have a problem running autoreconf once to get things working. *.suo and *.vcproj.user contain user-specific settings for the Visual Studio solution and project, and shouldn't be tracked in git either. You should really create a proper .gitignore for your project. Matt -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html