rebase: fix todo-list rereading

54fd3243da ("rebase -i: reread the todo list if `exec` touched it",
2017-04-26) sought to reread the todo list after running an exec
command only if it had been changed. To accomplish this it checks the
stat data of the todo list after running an exec command to see if it
has changed. Unfortunately there are two problems, firstly the
implementation is buggy we actually reread the list after each exec
which is quadratic in the number of commit lookups and secondly the
design is predicated on using nanosecond time stamps which are not the
default.

The implementation bug stems from the fact that we write a new todo
list to disk before running each command but do not update the stat
data to reflect this[1].

The design problem is that it is possible for the user to edit the
todo list without changing its size or inode which means we have to
rely on the mtime to tell us if it has changed. Unfortunately unless
git is built with USE_NSEC it is possible for the original and edited
list to share the same mtime.

Ideally "git rebase --edit-todo" would set a flag that we would then
check in sequencer.c. Unfortunately this is approach will not work as
there are scripts in the wild that write to the todo list directly
without running "git rebase --edit-todo". Instead of relying on stat
data this patch simply reads the possibly edited todo list and
compares it to the original with memcmp(). This is much faster than
reparsing the todo list each time. This patch reduces the time to run

   git rebase -r -xtrue v2.32.0~100 v2.32.0

which runs 419 exec commands by 6.6%. For comparison fixing the
implementation bug in stat based approach reduces the time by a
further 1.4% and is indistinguishable from never rereading the todo
list.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20191125131833.GD23183@szeder.dev/

Reported-by: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood@dunelm.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/sequencer.h b/sequencer.h
index d57d8ea23d..cdeb0c6be4 100644
--- a/sequencer.h
+++ b/sequencer.h
@@ -116,7 +116,6 @@ struct todo_list {
 	struct todo_item *items;
 	int nr, alloc, current;
 	int done_nr, total_nr;
-	struct stat_data stat;
 };
 
 #define TODO_LIST_INIT { STRBUF_INIT }