Re: kernel.org now has gitweb installed

From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Date: Apr 28, 2005, 21:20 UTC
Message-ID: <1114723214.2734.9.camel@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504281149330.18901@ppc970.osdl.org>

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 11:55 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Anyway, the reason remote and local don't matter is that if somebody else
> merges with me, and I just pull the result without having any changes in 
> my tree, we just "fast-forward" to that other side, because otherwise you 
> can never "converge" on anything (people merging each others trees would 
> always create a new commit, for no good reason).
> 
> What does that mean? It means that my local tree now became the _remote_ 
> parent, even though it was always local to my tree.

Hmm, that's true; albeit unfortunate.

Still, using the date isn't any better. It'll give results which are about as random as just sorting by the sha1 of each parent.

Yes, the ordering of the parents in a merge is probably meaningless in the general case, but so is the date.

The best we could probably do, from a theoretical standpoint, is to look at the paths via each parent to a common ancestor, and look at how many of the commits on each path were done by the same committer. Even that isn't ideal, and it's probably fairly expensive -- but it's pointless to pretend we can infer anything from _either_ the dates or the ordering of the parents in a merge.

-- 
dwmw2