threerings/flump — comment on commit 1ea16800f3e3a53ca221e145de80132cf0d85e33
File:  line 0
By groves:

I use something similar to that fairly frequently on the Java side of things: I'll pull a class file out of a jar and disassamble or md5 it to determine if it's a version that I'm thinking of. Without this, you'd have to find the right tree to determine if the exported version came from a particular source version. With this, you can compare the signature of the current version to the one you care about, skipping the search. Since we're both agreed a full tree read is required for either, why not do both?

File modification times are bogus since the files are coming from a VCS.