Re: Merge with git-pasky II.

From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Date: Apr 15, 2005, 16:01 UTC
Message-ID: <1113580881.27227.73.camel@hades.cambridge.redhat.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org>

On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 08:32 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

>  - you're doing the work at the wrong point. Doing it _well_ is quite 
>    expensive. So if you do it at commit time, you cannot _afford_ to do it 
>    well, and you'll always fall back to doing an ass-backwards job that 
>    doesn't really get you to the good state, and only gets you to a 
>    not-very-interesting easy 1% of the solution (ie full file renames).
> 
>  - you're doing the work at the wrong point for _another_ reason. You're 
>    freezing your (crappy) algorithm at tree creation time, and basically 
>    making it pointless to ever create something better later, because even 
>    if hardware and software improves, you've codified that "we have to
>    have crappy information".

OK, I'm inclined to agree. The only thing that prevents me from capitulating entirely and resubscribing to the "Torvalds is always right" school is the concern that it _is_ expensive, and that's why I originally wanted to do it at commit time because then it's a one-off cost rather than recurring every time we want to track the history of a given piece of content. Also because we actually have the developer's attention at commit time, and we can get _real_ answers from the user about what she was doing, instead of having to guess.

But if it can be done cheaply enough at a later date even though we end up repeating ourselves, and if it can be done _well_ enough that we shouldn't have just asked the user in the first place, then yes, OK I agree.

-- 
dwmw2