Re: [RFC PATCH] Make gitk use --early-output

Paul Mackerras [off-list ref] writes:

This makes gitk use the --early-output flag on the git log command.

When gitk sees the "Final output:" line from git log, it goes into a
mode where it basically just checks that it is getting the commits
again in the same order as before.  If they are, well and good; if
not, it truncates its internal list at the point of difference and
proceeds to read in the commits in the new order from there on, and
re-does the graph layout if necessary.

This gives a much more immediate feel to the startup; gitk shows its
window with the first screenful of commits displayed very quickly this
way.

This is not strictly related with the patch: would it be possible to let
gitk just stall reading from git-rev-list if it has rendered enough
content on-screen?  The behavior I have with gitk on enormous
repositories now is that it starts up reasonably fast and nice and then
proceeds to suck up all memory in the background.

Particularly annoying is that closing its window appears to work, but
wish will still proceed sucking up all the pending git-rev-list output
and allocating memory for it before it will actually exit.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum