On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 7:10 AM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Since references under "refs/bisect/" are per-worktree, they have to > be sought in the worktree rather than in the main repository. But > since loose references are found by traversing directories, the > reference iterator won't even get the idea to look for a > "refs/bisect/" directory in the worktree if there is not a directory > with that name in the main repository. Thus `get_ref_dir()` manually > inserts a dir_entry for "refs/bisect/" whenever it reads the entry for > "refs/". > > The current code then immediately calls `read_loose_refs()` on that > directory. But since the dir_entry is created with its `incomplete` > flag set, any traversal that gets to this point will read the > directory automatically. So there is no need to call > `read_loose_refs()` explicitly; the lazy mechanism suffices. > > And in fact, the attempt to `read_loose_refs()` was broken anyway. > That function needs its `dirname` argument to have a trailing `/` > character, but the invocation here was passing it "refs/bisect" > without a trailing slash. So `read_loose_refs()` would read > `$GIT_DIR/refs/bisect" correctly, but if it found an entry "foo" in > that directory, it would try to read "$GIT_DIR/refs/bisectfoo". > Normally it wouldn't find anything at that path, but the failure was > canceled out because `get_ref_dir()` *also* forgot to reset the > `REF_INCOMPLETE` bit on the dir_entry. So the read was attempted again > when it was accessed, via the lazy mechanism, and this time the read > was done correctly. With all this retry logic going on, it is hard to add a test demonstrating this is correct now. The description makes sense though. Thanks, Stefan