On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 12:24:43AM -0500, Jeff King wrote: > > If people have to ask on the mailing list even after reading the man > > pages, that's a strong indicator that we could do better. > > Sure. That's why I suggested improving the documentation in my last > email. But in all the discussion, I haven't seen any patch to that > effect. Maybe like this. -- >8 -- Subject: [PATCH] git-status.txt: mention --no-optional-locks If you come to the documentation thinking "I do not want Git to take any locks for my background processes", then you may easily run across "--no-optional-locks" in git.txt. But it's quite reasonable to hit a specific instance of the problem: you have "git status" running in the background, and you notice that it causes lock contention with other processes. So you look in git-status.txt to see if there is a way to disable it, but there's no mention of the flag. Let's add a short note mentioning that status does indeed touch the index (and why), with a pointer to the global option. That can point users in the right direction and help them make a more informed decision about what they're disabling. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> --- Documentation/git-status.txt | 13 +++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/git-status.txt b/Documentation/git-status.txt index fc282e0a92..81cab9aefb 100644 --- a/Documentation/git-status.txt +++ b/Documentation/git-status.txt @@ -387,6 +387,19 @@ ignored submodules you can either use the --ignore-submodules=dirty command line option or the 'git submodule summary' command, which shows a similar output but does not honor these settings. +BACKGROUND REFRESH +------------------ + +By default, `git status` will automatically refresh the index, updating +the cached stat information from the working tree and writing out the +result. Writing out the updated index is an optimization that isn't +strictly necessary (`status` computes the values for itself, but writing +them out is just to save subsequent programs from repeating our +computation). When `status` is run in the background, the lock held +during the write may conflict with other simultaneous processes, causing +them to fail. Scripts running `status` in the background should consider +using `git --no-optional-locks status` (see linkgit:git[1] for details). + SEE ALSO -------- linkgit:gitignore[5] -- 2.15.0.687.g5a800c9f78
