On 2/20/2018 5:57 PM, Jeff King wrote:
On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 05:12:50PM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote:

In rev-list, the "--header" option outputs a value and expects the buffer to
be cached. It outputs the header info only if get_cached_commit_buffer()
returns a non-null buffer, giving incorrect output. If it called
get_commit_buffer() instead, it would immediately call
get_cached_commit_buffer() and on failure actually load the buffer.

This has not been a problem before, since the buffer was always loaded at
some point for each commit (and saved because of the save_commit_buffer
global).

I propose to make get_cached_commit_buffer() static to commit.c and convert
all callers to get_commit_buffer(). Is there any reason to _not_ do this? It
seems that there is no functional or performance change.
That helper was added in 152ff1cceb (provide helpers to access the
commit buffer, 2014-06-10). I think interesting part is the final
paragraph:

       Note that we also need to add a "get_cached" variant which
       returns NULL when we do not have a cached buffer. At first
       glance this seems to defeat the purpose of "get", which is
       to always provide a return value. However, some log code
       paths actually use the NULL-ness of commit->buffer as a
       boolean flag to decide whether to try printing the
       commit. At least for now, we want to continue supporting
       that use.

So I think a conversion to get_commit_buffer() would break the callers
that use the boolean nature for something useful. Unfortunately the
author did not enumerate exactly what those uses are, so we'll have to
dig. :)

My guess is that it has to do with showing some commits twice, since we
would normally have the buffer available the first time we hit the
commit, and then free it in finish_commit().

If we blame that rev-list line (and then walk back over a bunch of
uninteresting commits via parent re-blaming), it comes from 3131b71301
(Add "--show-all" revision walker flag for debugging, 2008-02-09).

Thanks for doing this digging. I appreciate the breadcrumbs, too, so I can do a better job of digging next time.

So there it is. It does show commits multiple times, but suppresses the
verbose header after the first showing. If we do something like this:

   git rev-list --show-all --pretty --boundary c93150cfb0^-

you'll see some boundary commits that _don't_ have their pretty headers
shown. And with your proposed patch, we'd show them again. To keep the
same behavior we need to store that "we've already seen this" boolean
somewhere else (e.g., in an object flag; possibly SEEN, but that might
run afoul of other logic).

What confuses me about this behavior is that the OID is still shown on the repeat (and in the case of `git log --oneline` will not actually have a line break between two short-OIDs). I don't believe this behavior is something to preserve.

You are right that we definitely don't want to show the full content twice.

It looks like the call in log-tree comes from the same commit, and
serves the same purpose.

Aside from storing the boolean "did we show it" in another way, the
other option is to simply change the behavior and accept that we might
pretty-print the commit twice. This is a backwards-incompatible change,
but I'm not sure if anybody would care. According to that commit,
--show-all was added explicitly for debugging, and it has never been
documented.  I couldn't find any reference to people actually using it
on the list (a grep of the whole archive turns up 32 messages, most of
which are just it appearing in context; the only person mentioning its
actual use was Linus in 2008.

Unless I am misunderstanding, the current behavior on a repeated commit is already incorrect: some amount of output occurs before checking the buffer, so the output includes repeated records but with formatting that violates the expectation. By doing the simple change of swapping get_cached_commit_buffer() with get_commit_buffer(), we correct that format violation but have duplicate copies.

The most-correct thing to do (in my opinion) is to put the requirement of "no repeats" into the revision walk logic and stop having the formatting methods expect them. Then, however we change this boolean setting of "we have seen this before" it will not require the formatting methods to change.

I can start working on a patch to move the duplicate-removal logic into revision.c instead of these three callers:

builtin/rev-list.c:     if (revs->verbose_header && get_cached_commit_buffer(commit, NULL)) {
log-tree.c:     if (!get_cached_commit_buffer(commit, NULL))
object.c:                       if (!get_cached_commit_buffer(commit, NULL)) {

But this caller seems pretty important in pretty.c:

        /*
         * Otherwise, we still want to munge the encoding header in the
         * result, which will be done by modifying the buffer. If we
         * are using a fresh copy, we can reuse it. But if we are using
         * the cached copy from get_commit_buffer, we need to duplicate it
         * to avoid munging the cached copy.
         */
        if (msg == get_cached_commit_buffer(commit, NULL))
                out = xstrdup(msg);
        else
                out = (char *)msg

Thanks,
-Stolee

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