Re: Following renames

On 3/27/06, Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Marco Costalba wrote:

quoted

Historic Linux test (63428 revisions)

File: drivers/net/tg3.c
Revisions that modify tg3.c : 292

With qgit
15s to retrieve file history (git-rev-list)
19.5s to annotate (git-diff-tree -p, current GNU algorithm, not new faster one)

.. and it does absolutely _nothing_ while it's doing that, does it?

yes, it's true.

quoted

$ time git-whatchanged HEAD drivers/net/tg3.c > /dev/null
98.01user 2.44system 1:46.19elapsed 94%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (797major+43033minor)pagefaults 0swaps

In contrast, git-whatchanged will start outputting the recent changes
immediately.

And that's the point. Almost always, we're interested in the _recent_
stuff. The fact that it takes longer to get the old history  is not very
important. You generally don't ask "what changed in this file" for a file
that hasn't changed in five years.

We could run git-rev-list with a time range specifier (changes of last
year as example) by default so to have fast results and run all time
history _only_  on request.

This perhaps could solve the fast output for recent revs problem, if
this is the problem.

I still think the problem with annotation is that you don't see
patches that _remove_ lines of code, you need the whole diff for this.

Marco