On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 10:30:28AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > It looks like I _did_ look into optimizing this into a single stat() > > call in the thread at [1]. I completely forgot about that. I did find > > there that naively using stat_validity() on a directory is racy, though > > I wonder if we could do something clever with gettimeofday() instead. > > It feels funny to hear an idea to compare fs timestamp with gettimeofday > immedately after hearing the word NFS, though ;-). Yeah, I had a funny feeling in my stomach as I wrote that. What you really want to know is the current filesystem time. You'd probably have to do something gross like creating a new file and then comparing its timestamp. In theory you'd only have to do that _once_, and then as long as the pack directory wasn't changing, you could say "I don't know what time it is now, but I know it is at least time X, and I know that X is greater than Y, the pack directory timestamp, therefore the pack directory hasn't changed since I last looked". That assumes monotonic clocks, but we basically already do so for the racy-git checks, I think. I dunno. It feels...complicated. And bad to require writing to the repository for what would otherwise be a read-only operation. But I don't see any fundamental reason it could not work. -Peff