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dir: replace exponential algorithm with a linear one
dir's read_directory_recursive() naturally operates recursively in order
to walk the directory tree. Treating of directories is sometimes weird
because there are so many different permutations about how to handle
directories. Some examples:
* 'git ls-files -o --directory' only needs to know that a directory
itself is untracked; it doesn't need to recurse into it to see what
is underneath.
* 'git status' needs to recurse into an untracked directory, but only
to determine whether or not it is empty. If there are no files
underneath, the directory itself will be omitted from the output.
If it is not empty, only the directory will be listed.
* 'git status --ignored' needs to recurse into untracked directories
and report all the ignored entries and then report the directory as
untracked -- UNLESS all the entries under the directory are
ignored, in which case we don't print any of the entries under the
directory and just report the directory itself as ignored. (Note
that although this forces us to walk all untracked files underneath
the directory as well, we strip them from the output, except for
users like 'git clean' who also set DIR_KEEP_TRACKED_CONTENTS.)
* For 'git clean', we may need to recurse into a directory that
doesn't match any specified pathspecs, if it's possible that there
is an entry underneath the directory that can match one of the
pathspecs. In such a case, we need to be careful to omit the
directory itself from the list of paths (see commit 404ebce
("dir: also check directories for matching pathspecs", 2019-09-17))
Part of the tension noted above is that the treatment of a directory can
change based on the files within it, and based on the various settings
in dir->flags. Trying to keep this in mind while reading over the code,
it is easy to think in terms of "treat_directory() tells us what to do
with a directory, and read_directory_recursive() is the thing that
recurses". Since we need to look into a directory to know how to treat
it, though, it is quite easy to decide to (also) recurse into the
directory from treat_directory() by adding a read_directory_recursive()
call. Adding such a call is actually fine, IF we make sure that
read_directory_recursive() does not also recurse into that same
directory.
Unfortunately, commit df5bcdf ("dir: recurse into untracked dirs
for ignored files", 2017-05-18), added exactly such a case to the code,
meaning we'd have two calls to read_directory_recursive() for an
untracked directory. So, if we had a file named
one/two/three/four/five/somefile.txt
and nothing in one/ was tracked, then 'git status --ignored' would
call read_directory_recursive() twice on the directory 'one/', and
each of those would call read_directory_recursive() twice on the
directory 'one/two/', and so on until read_directory_recursive() was
called 2^5 times for 'one/two/three/four/five/'.
Avoid calling read_directory_recursive() twice per level by moving a
lot of the special logic into treat_directory().
Since dir.c is somewhat complex, extra cruft built up around this over
time. While trying to unravel it, I noticed several instances where the
first call to read_directory_recursive() would return e.g.
path_untracked for some directory and a later one would return e.g.
path_none, despite the fact that the directory clearly should have been
considered untracked. The code happened to work due to the side-effect
from the first invocation of adding untracked entries to dir->entries;
this allowed it to get the correct output despite the supposed override
in return value by the later call.
I am somewhat concerned that there are still bugs and maybe even
testcases with the wrong expectation. I have tried to carefully
document treat_directory() since it becomes more complex after this
change (though much of this complexity came from elsewhere that probably
deserved better comments to begin with). However, much of my work felt
more like a game of whackamole while attempting to make the code match
the existing regression tests than an attempt to create an
implementation that matched some clear design. That seems wrong to me,
but the rules of existing behavior had so many special cases that I had
a hard time coming up with some overarching rules about what correct
behavior is for all cases, forcing me to hope that the regression tests
are correct and sufficient. Such a hope seems likely to be ill-founded,
given my experience with dir.c-related testcases in the last few months:
Examples where the documentation was hard to parse or even just wrong:
* 3aca580 (git-clean.txt: do not claim we will delete files with
-n/--dry-run, 2019-09-17)
* 09487f2 (clean: avoid removing untracked files in a nested git
repository, 2019-09-17)
* e86bbcf (clean: disambiguate the definition of -d, 2019-09-17)
Examples where testcases were declared wrong and changed:
* 09487f2 (clean: avoid removing untracked files in a nested git
repository, 2019-09-17)
* e86bbcf (clean: disambiguate the definition of -d, 2019-09-17)
* a2b1336 (Revert "dir.c: make 'git-status --ignored' work within
leading directories", 2019-12-10)
Examples where testcases were clearly inadequate:
* 502c386 (t7300-clean: demonstrate deleting nested repo with an
ignored file breakage, 2019-08-25)
* 7541cc5 (t7300: add testcases showing failure to clean specified
pathspecs, 2019-09-17)
* a5e916c (dir: fix off-by-one error in match_pathspec_item,
2019-09-17)
* 404ebce (dir: also check directories for matching pathspecs,
2019-09-17)
* 09487f2 (clean: avoid removing untracked files in a nested git
repository, 2019-09-17)
* e86bbcf (clean: disambiguate the definition of -d, 2019-09-17)
* 452efd1 (t3011: demonstrate directory traversal failures,
2019-12-10)
* b9670c1 (dir: fix checks on common prefix directory, 2019-12-19)
Examples where "correct behavior" was unclear to everyone:
https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email protected]/
Other commits of note:
* 902b90c (clean: fix theoretical path corruption, 2019-09-17)
However, on the positive side, it does make the code much faster. For
the following simple shell loop in an empty repository:
for depth in $(seq 10 25)
do
dirs=$(for i in $(seq 1 $depth) ; do printf 'dir/' ; done)
rm -rf dir
mkdir -p $dirs
>$dirs/untracked-file
/usr/bin/time --format="$depth: %e" git status --ignored >/dev/null
done
I saw the following timings, in seconds (note that the numbers are a
little noisy from run-to-run, but the trend is very clear with every
run):
10: 0.03
11: 0.05
12: 0.08
13: 0.19
14: 0.29
15: 0.50
16: 1.05
17: 2.11
18: 4.11
19: 8.60
20: 17.55
21: 33.87
22: 68.71
23: 140.05
24: 274.45
25: 551.15
For the above run, using strace I can look for the number of untracked
directories opened and can verify that it matches the expected
2^($depth+1)-2 (the sum of 2^1 + 2^2 + 2^3 + ... + 2^$depth).
After this fix, with strace I can verify that the number of untracked
directories that are opened drops to just $depth, and the timings all
drop to 0.00. In fact, it isn't until a depth of 190 nested directories
that it sometimes starts reporting a time of 0.01 seconds and doesn't
consistently report 0.01 seconds until there are 240 nested directories.
The previous code would have taken
17.55 * 2^220 / (60*60*24*365) = 9.4 * 10^59 YEARS
to have completed the 240 nested directories case. It's not often
that you get to speed something up by a factor of 3*10^69.
Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>
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