On Thu, Aug 02, 2018 at 02:14:30PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > I also wonder if Windows could return some other file-unique identifier > > that would work in place of an inode here. That would be pretty easy to > > swap in via an #ifdef's helper function. I'd be OK shipping without that > > and letting Windows folks fill it in later (as long as we do not do > > anything too stupid until then, like claim all of the inode==0 files are > > the same). > > Yeah, but such a useful file-unique identifier would probably be > used in place of inum in their (l)stat emulation already, if exists, > no? Maybe. It might not work as ino_t. Or it might be expensive to get. Or maybe it's simply impossible. I don't know much about Windows. Some searching implies that NTFS does have a "file index" concept which is supposed to be unique. At any rate, until we have an actual plan for Windows, I think it would make sense only to split the cases into "has working inodes" and "other", and make sure "other" does something sensible in the meantime (like mention the conflict, but skip trying to list duplicates). When somebody wants to work on Windows support, then we can figure out if it just needs to wrap the "get unique identifier" operation, or if it would use a totally different algorithm. -Peff
