cat-file: disable object/refname ambiguity check for batch mode

A common use of "cat-file --batch-check" is to feed a list
of objects from "rev-list --objects" or a similar command.
In this instance, all of our input objects are 40-byte sha1
ids. However, cat-file has always allowed arbitrary revision
specifiers, and feeds the result to get_sha1().

Fortunately, get_sha1() recognizes a 40-byte sha1 before
doing any hard work trying to look up refs, meaning this
scenario should end up spending very little time converting
the input into an object sha1. However, since 798c35f
(get_sha1: warn about full or short object names that look
like refs, 2013-05-29), when we encounter this case, we
spend the extra effort to do a refname lookup anyway, just
to print a warning. This is further exacerbated by ca91993
(get_packed_ref_cache: reload packed-refs file when it
changes, 2013-06-20), which makes individual ref lookup more
expensive by requiring a stat() of the packed-refs file for
each missing ref.

With no patches, this is the time it takes to run:

  $ git rev-list --objects --all >objects
  $ time git cat-file --batch-check='%(objectname)' <objects

on the linux.git repository:

  real    1m13.494s
  user    0m25.924s
  sys     0m47.532s

If we revert ca91993, the packed-refs up-to-date check, it
gets a little better:

  real    0m54.697s
  user    0m21.692s
  sys     0m32.916s

but we are still spending quite a bit of time on ref lookup
(and we would not want to revert that patch, anyway, which
has correctness issues).  If we revert 798c35f, disabling
the warning entirely, we get a much more reasonable time:

  real    0m7.452s
  user    0m6.836s
  sys     0m0.608s

This patch does the moral equivalent of this final case (and
gets similar speedups). We introduce a global flag that
callers of get_sha1() can use to avoid paying the price for
the warning.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/sha1_name.c b/sha1_name.c
index a1e0f804dc..c1957f35c1 100644
--- a/sha1_name.c
+++ b/sha1_name.c
@@ -451,13 +451,15 @@ static int get_sha1_basic(const char *str, int len, unsigned char *sha1)
 	int at, reflog_len;
 
 	if (len == 40 && !get_sha1_hex(str, sha1)) {
-		refs_found = dwim_ref(str, len, tmp_sha1, &real_ref);
-		if (refs_found > 0 && warn_ambiguous_refs) {
-			warning(warn_msg, len, str);
-			if (advice_object_name_warning)
-				fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", _(object_name_msg));
+		if (warn_on_object_refname_ambiguity) {
+			refs_found = dwim_ref(str, len, tmp_sha1, &real_ref);
+			if (refs_found > 0 && warn_ambiguous_refs) {
+				warning(warn_msg, len, str);
+				if (advice_object_name_warning)
+					fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", _(object_name_msg));
+			}
+			free(real_ref);
 		}
-		free(real_ref);
 		return 0;
 	}