On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 06:57:26AM -0800, Elijah Newren wrote: > > This does increase the coupling between tree-walk and unpack-trees a > > bit. I'd be OK just switching to ALLOC_ARRAY(), too. I doubt the > > performance improvement is measurable, and the cleanup free() calls are > > already there. > > Could we undo this cyclic dependency between tree-walk and > unpack-trees by defining MAX_TRAVERSE_TREES in tree-walk.h, making > MAX_UNPACK_TREES in unpack-trees.h be defined to MAX_TRAVERSE_TREES, > and remove the include of unpack-trees.h in tree-walk.c? I don't mind doing that, but I had a hard time trying to write a commit message. I.e., I can explain the current use of MAX_UNPACK_TREES here, or defining MAX_TRAVERSE_TREES as MAX_UNPACK_TREES by saying "this is an arbitrary limit, but it's the highest value any caller would use with us". But to define MAX_UNPACK_TREES in terms of MAX_TRAVERSE_TREES, I feel we've created a circular reasoning in the justification. I'm not even sure whether the current value of 8 is meaningful. It comes from this commit: commit ca885a4fe6444bed840295378848904106c87c85 Author: Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu Mar 13 22:07:18 2008 -0700 read-tree() and unpack_trees(): use consistent limit read-tree -m can read up to MAX_TREES, which was arbitrarily set to 8 since August 2007 (4 is needed to deal with 2 merge-base case). However, the updated unpack_trees() code had an advertised limit of 4 (which it enforced). In reality the code was prepared to take only 3 trees and giving 4 caused it to stomp on its stack. Rename the MAX_TREES constant to MAX_UNPACK_TREES, move it to the unpack-trees.h common header file, and use it from both places to avoid future confusion. which kind of makes me wonder if we should just go back to calling it MAX_TREES. I guess that's too vague, though. So I dunno. It would be easy to do as you asked, but I'm not convinced it actually untangles anything meaningful. -Peff