Re: in-memory editing with EDT or EVE

On 11/23/24 12:29 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

On 11/23/2024 1:10 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:

On Fri, 22 Nov 2024 19:59:07 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

But this is what a source control system really should be using for such
functionality. No need for temporary disk files.

>
"should" seems awfully strong there and I don't understand why temporary
disk files pose a problem.

 It is likely not a problem with any measurable impact.
 But for the task as hand - having the user write a
commit message that is to be send to a server over the
network - then the use of a temporary files seems like
an unnecessary detour to me.
 

                                   To compute the commit ID, git has to
calculate the SHA1 of the actual content changes, the metadata (who,
when, etc.), and the commit message. While that could theoretically all
be done in memory, how can be you sure it would all fit in memory?

 The files being committed are on disk, so Git will be doing disk IO.
 But I don't see that as an argument for that the commit message need to
pass through a file.
 

                                                            Plus
debugging and recovery from failed operations would surely be much
easier with some kind of persistence of intermediate steps.

 Maybe. But It is not obvious to me that having commit message
on disk in a temporary file will help troubleshooting.
 

                                                          So I think
the actual design of git is much better than this hypothetical one that
tries to avoid saving anything to disk until the last step.

 The commit message should not be saved on disk client side at all.
The message get created and get sent to the server over the network.

There is no "client."  In a DVCS like git, when you commit a change,
everything is written locally.  Pushing to a server is an optional
separate operation and what you push is the version history that has
been written locally first.  There is never a point where the commit
message is sent over the network to another machine before being stored
as one component of a commit.