Shuqi Liang wrote: > Hi Victoria, > > Sorry for the late reply. I'm still in the middle of my final exams period. No problem at all, thanks for following up! > It's true that in the case of 'diff-files', expanding the sparse directory to > match a pathspec to its contents might not be necessary. If we don't use > pathspec expansion in this case. It could optimize for performance better. > > However, there could be some edge cases. if a user manually modifies the > contents of a SKIP_WORKTREE file in the working tree, the diff between > the working tree and the index would no longer be empty. So I think, In this > case, expanding the sparse directory might still be necessary to ensure the > correct behavior of the 'diff-files' command. If a user manually modifies a SKIP_WORKTREE file, SKIP_WORKTREE will be removed from the file and the index expanded automatically [1]. If that mechanism is working properly, there would be no need to manually check the pathspec and expand the index. Have you tried removing the 'pathspec_needs_expanded_index()' and running the tests? If so, is 'diff-files' producing incorrect results? [1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/11d46a399d26c913787b704d2b7169cafc28d639.1642175983.git.gitgitgadget@xxxxxxxxx/
