Re: kernel.org now has gitweb installed
- From
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
- Date
- Apr 28, 2005, 21:47 UTC
- Message-ID
- <1114724866.2734.27.camel@localhost.localdomain>
- In-Reply-To
- <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504281432490.18901@ppc970.osdl.org>
On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 14:40 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
Show 7 quoted lines
> Wrong. The date _does_ have meaning. It shows which of the parents was
> more recent, which indirectly is a hint about which side had more activity
> going on.
>
> In other words, it _is_ meanginful. Maybe it's a _statistical_ meaning
> ("that side is probably the active one, because it has the last commit"),
> but it's a meaning.It's not entirely clear what 'active' is supposed to be useful for in this instance. You could just as well count the commits between the merge and the common ancestor, if you want to see which side was most _active_ -- but that isn't helpful for deciding the order in which 'cg-log' should show commits.
What you really want there is 'local' vs. 'remote', because people want to see the order in which changesets arrived in the _local_ repository -- if the last thing you did was pull from me, people want all my changesets to be at the top; regardless of who last committed to their tree before the merge -- i.e. regardless of whether I did a last-minute commit before you pulled, or whether you'd done another commit to your tree immediately before pulling.
As you rightly point out, the local/remote information isn't really available in an easy form -- certainly not from the ordering of the parents in a merge commit. But let's not fool ourselves that we can piece it together from the date either.
OK, the date _is_ meaningful in a way, but only in the same way that the author's name and IRC address information is meaningful. Of course we didn't include it for _nothing_, but it's outside the scope of git itself; it isn't part of the useful information which git should care about.
-- dwmw2