Re: [PATCH/RFC] rev-list: add --authorship-order alternative ordering

Elliott Cable [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

And update revs->lifo to use that same enum, without adding
use_author_date bit to rev_info.

I'll look into replacing lifo with an enum as soon as I can sit back
down to update this patch. For the moment, nothing more than
committer_date_sort and author_date_sort, I suppose?

I'll try and make this a separate patch. First commit, to replace lifo
with an enum; second commit, to *actually implement* the code obeying
that enum when it is set to author_date_order.

If you want to do this in a multi-step series (which may not be a
bad idea), I would imagine that the enum starts as a choice between
the two: traversal-order vs committer-date-order.  The first patch
would change nothing else.

And then you would add the third choice, author-date-order, and
implement the logic to sort them using author instead of committer
date in the same patch.

quoted

Elliott: you can see the relevant changes to the topo-sort in commit
96c4f4a (commit: allow associating auxiliary info on-demand,
2013-04-09).

-Peff

Again, might be a little over my head. If you really think it's best
that I look into that branch, I will try. :)

Meantime, is there any other, more-immediate approach you can think
of? I thought, for a moment, of only storing *either* the committer
*or* the author date in the commit-struct at a given time, and
flagging with a single bit ... but I'm not sure how widely-spread the
nead for committer-date currently is. Maybe I can go back and
parse-out the author date *when I need it*, instead, though that
sounds slow …

You would parse all of them at the beginning of topo-sort function
once and store these dates in the commit-info-slab (alongside with
indegree).  Once you are done sorting, you can discard the slab.

This could be done as a follow-up patch, but the tons of helper
functions you added to compare by author date to revision.c will
have to be removed in such a transition, because the whole point of
using commit-info-slab is not to have commit->author_date field,
which these new helpers work on.