Re: git-rerere observations and feature suggestions

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:19:03AM +0200, Karl Hasselström [off-list ref] wrote:

What you're describing is pretty much what we're thinking about doing
-- have a log branch where each commit contains enough metadata to
recreate the complete patch stack state at that point in time, and has
all the parents it needs to be safe from gc.

The particular problem I'm asking about here is that due to StGit's
concept of "unapplied" patches that are per definition not reachable
from the current branch head, a given log entry might have to keep an
unbounded number of commits from being gc'ed. Thus my question about
what would blow up if we were to make a commit with 50 parents. Or
100. Or 1000, if our users are crazy enough. (The alternative being,
of course, to make a tree of octopuses with a fixed maximum fan-out.)

I may miss something, but you have (at least) two options to store
"patches".

You can store them as a blob, make a tree of them and make a commit in
the log branch point to the tree. This one has the advantage of being
able to do a 'git log' on a particular patch of the patch set.

The other one is to create n+1 trees (and commits, where the first
commit has no parent) for n patches, and point to the last commit from
the log branch.