Re: Merge with git-pasky II.

On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 08:32 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

 - you're doing the work at the wrong point. Doing it _well_ is quite 
   expensive. So if you do it at commit time, you cannot _afford_ to do it 
   well, and you'll always fall back to doing an ass-backwards job that 
   doesn't really get you to the good state, and only gets you to a 
   not-very-interesting easy 1% of the solution (ie full file renames).

 - you're doing the work at the wrong point for _another_ reason. You're 
   freezing your (crappy) algorithm at tree creation time, and basically 
   making it pointless to ever create something better later, because even 
   if hardware and software improves, you've codified that "we have to
   have crappy information".

OK, I'm inclined to agree. The only thing that prevents me from
capitulating entirely and resubscribing to the "Torvalds is always
right" school is the concern that it _is_ expensive, and that's why I
originally wanted to do it at commit time because then it's a one-off
cost rather than recurring every time we want to track the history of a
given piece of content. Also because we actually have the developer's
attention at commit time, and we can get _real_ answers from the user
about what she was doing, instead of having to guess.

But if it can be done cheaply enough at a later date even though we end
up repeating ourselves, and if it can be done _well_ enough that we
shouldn't have just asked the user in the first place, then yes, OK I
agree.

-- 
dwmw2