Re: [PATCH/RFC 2/2] Make path-limiting be incremental when possible.

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

This is an absolutely huge deal for anything like "git log -- <pathname>", 
but also for some things that we don't do yet - like the "find where 
things changed" logic I've described elsewhere, where we want to find the 
previous revision that changed a file.
...
Btw, don't even bother testing this with the git archive. git itself is so 
small that parsing the whole revision history for it takes about a second 
even with path limiting.

By the way, I forgot to praise you ;-).  

Even on a fast machine, the old one was not very useful, but
this one is _instantaneous_.  Very good job.

Indeed. It's why I'd really like this to be merged before 1.3.0 - it moves 
a certain class of problems from "it works" to "it's actually usable".

Now, the _real_ usage I foresee (which just wasn't practical before) is 
the interactive annotation thing - this won't help a _full_file_ annotate 
(which usually needs to go back to the very first version of a file 
anyway), but it should make it possible to play with an incremental one 
(the "graphical git-whatchanged" kind).

But even just the "git log" difference makes it worth it. 

		Linus