gitk and --no-walk

From: Mikko Rantalainen <mikko.rantalainen@peda.net>
Date: Jan 23, 2021, 14:53 UTC
Message-ID: <00b30f2d-44bb-43b9-c852-45a1d9ed4346@peda.net>

Dear Sirs,

I asked a question about how to make gitk behave like git log --no-walk at https://stackoverflow.com/q/65848193/334451 and found out that gitk implementation currently simply ignores --no-walk.

According to comment near the actual code in gitk says

Show 5 quoted lines

> proc parseviewargs {n arglist} {
> ...
> ... "--no-walk" ...
>   # These cause our parsing of git log's output to fail, or else
>   # they're options we want to set ourselves, so ignore them.

However, if I remove the "--no-walk" from that list and e.g. try to run following command line with Linux kernel repo

gitk --no-walk 7a223e06b b5de3c502 f05badde4 6ec4bae1 1b937e8f 444fe991

everything seems to work just fine and I get the expected output. Without modifying the gitk source code gitk just renders whole git repo which takes A LOT of time for something as complex as linux kernel.

Note that I intentionally mixed the order of commit ids in the example above to test that the history is still rendered correctly.

Is there a reason to keep ignoring the --no-walk flag anymore?

(Tested with git version 2.17.1.)

-- 
Best regards,
Mikko