On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 03:13:24AM -0500, Jeff King wrote: > I noticed that "git checkout $tree -- $path" will _always_ unlink and > write a new copy of each matching path, even if they are up-to-date with > the index and the content in $tree is the same. By the way, one other thing I wondered while looking at this code: when we checkout a working tree file, we unlink the old one and write the new one in-place. Is there a particular reason we do this versus writing to a temporary file and renaming it into place? That would give simultaneous readers a more atomic view. I suspect the answer is something like: you cannot always do a rename, because you might have a typechange, directory becoming a file, or vice versa; so anyone relying on an atomic view during a checkout operation is already Doing It Wrong. Handling a content-change of an existing path would complicate the code, so we do not bother. But I would be curious to hear confirmation of that. -Peff -- 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