update-index doc: note the caveat with "could not open..."

[thirdparty/git.git] / Documentation / git-update-index.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/git-update-index.txt b/Documentation/git-update-index.txt
index bdb0342593229e32425bf73d17ad6fcdd0dd3732..b8d3c0d72e9f270176c479bdbca2a7468e1b1ebc 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/git-update-index.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-update-index.txt
@@ -464,6 +464,32 @@ command reads the index; while when `--[no-|force-]untracked-cache`
 are used, the untracked cache is immediately added to or removed from
 the index.
 
+Before 2.17, the untracked cache had a bug where replacing a directory
+with a symlink to another directory could cause it to incorrectly show
+files tracked by git as untracked. See the "status: add a failing test
+showing a core.untrackedCache bug" commit to git.git. A workaround for
+that is (and this might work for other undiscovered bugs in the
+future):
+
+----------------
+$ git -c core.untrackedCache=false status
+----------------
+
+This bug has also been shown to affect non-symlink cases of replacing
+a directory with a file when it comes to the internal structures of
+the untracked cache, but no case has been reported where this resulted in
+wrong "git status" output.
+
+There are also cases where existing indexes written by git versions
+before 2.17 will reference directories that don't exist anymore,
+potentially causing many "could not open directory" warnings to be
+printed on "git status". These are new warnings for existing issues
+that were previously silently discarded.
+
+As with the bug described above the solution is to one-off do a "git
+status" run with `core.untrackedCache=false` to flush out the leftover
+bad data.
+
 File System Monitor
 -------------------