merge-ort: clarify the interning of strings in opt->priv->path

Because merge-ort is dealing with potentially all the pathnames in the
repository, it sometimes needs to do an awful lot of string comparisons.
Because of this, struct merge_options_internal's path member was
envisioned from the beginning to contain an interned value for every
path in order to allow us to compare strings via pointer comparison
instead of using strcmp.  See
  * 5b59c3db059d (merge-ort: setup basic internal data structures,
                  2020-12-13)
  * f591c4724615 (merge-ort: copy and adapt merge_3way() from
                  merge-recursive.c, 2021-01-01)
for some of the early comments.

However, the original comment was slightly misleading when it switched
from mentioning paths to only mentioning directories.  Fix that, and
while at it also point to an example in the code which applies the extra
needed care to permit the pointer comparison optimization.

Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/merge-ort.c b/merge-ort.c
index 9b9d82ed10..325b19b182 100644
--- a/merge-ort.c
+++ b/merge-ort.c
@@ -316,9 +316,14 @@ struct merge_options_internal {
 	 *     (e.g. "drivers/firmware/raspberrypi.c").
 	 *   * store all relevant paths in the repo, both directories and
 	 *     files (e.g. drivers, drivers/firmware would also be included)
-	 *   * these keys serve to intern all the path strings, which allows
-	 *     us to do pointer comparison on directory names instead of
-	 *     strcmp; we just have to be careful to use the interned strings.
+	 *   * these keys serve to intern *all* path strings, which allows us
+	 *     to do pointer comparisons on file & directory names instead of
+	 *     using strcmp; however, for this pointer-comparison optimization
+	 *     to work, any code path that independently computes a path needs
+	 *     to check for it existing in this strmap, and if so, point to
+	 *     the path in this strmap instead of their computed copy.  See
+	 *     the "reuse known pointer" comment in
+	 *     apply_directory_rename_modifications() for an example.
 	 *
 	 * The values of paths:
 	 *   * either a pointer to a merged_info, or a conflict_info struct