Re: Can I have this, pretty please?

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

quoted

quoted

So, use "git log --pretty=oneline" instead, which doesn't have the
expense.

Yes, like managing a manual with grep is all one needs.  git log
--pretty=oneline provides just the commit headers, but offers no way
to jump into the commits themselves and back easily.

You misunderstand.

I was suggesting you do a *tool* that bases its listing on 
--pretty=oneline, and then goes from there.

Full agreement here.  My tool was going to pass those lines off as
article headers.

If you don't show the graph anyway, all the complex and expensive
things that "git-rev-list --topo-order" does is pretty much totally
useless.  You're going to show the commits as a list anyway, and
then when you *select* one commit for closer inspection, you can
then try to do a better job at that point of doing the reachability
(ie parenthood is trivial, and the branch reachability is cheap if
it's close to the tip of the tree, which it would almost always be).

Quite so.  I was thinking of doing such a tool inside of Emacs (after
all, Emacs is the most extensive junkyard for prototyping editing
solutions that can be had) and was weighing options for what kind of
stuff I would need to be doing to have it work efficiently, offering
access to everything without wasting unnecessary time on those things
that don't interest me at the moment.

And what I came up with had far too many similarities to what a
newsreader does...  So my first reaction to that idea was to post to
the Gnus Usenet group proposing some sort of virtual server method for
Gnus (it already has more than a dozen for managing news, mail,
various mail and news spools, diaries, Google, Slashdot, files,
directories, virtual groups...).  But it occured to me that the
mapping of information to NNTP is actually so straightforward that the
idea seemed exploitable not just by Emacs users.

But if you have a client that is incremental anyway, almost all of
that goes away.

Yup.  Omniscience is overrated in computer science.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum