Re: git-viz tool for visualising commit trees

 > Ingo Molnar [Thu, 21 Apr 2005]:
 > I just checked how the kernel repository looks like with it, and
 > i'm impressed! The GUI is top-notch, and the whole graph output and
 > navigation is very mature visually. Kudos!

Thanks !

 > - there doesnt seem to be any performance difference between non-colored 
 >   and colored rendering - so you might as well want to make 'color by 
 >   author' (or color by branch) the default coloring, instead of 
 >   uncolored?

It has to call `cat-file commit' for each commit id to get the author ... it's just that's a lot of forks.

 > - naming the boxes by key is quite meaningless. It would be more 
 >   informative to see the author's email shortcuts in the boxes. Also, it 
 >   would be nice to see some simple graphical feedback about the size and 
 >   scope of a changeset, without having to zoom on it.

That's interesting. What do you mean exactly by scope ?

 > i guess you know it, and i'm definitely not complaining about prototype 
 > code, but rendering is quite slow: drawing the 340 changesets in the 
 > current kernel repository takes 15 seconds on a 2 GHz P4. Drawing the 
 > full kernel history (63,000 changesets) would take more than 45 minutes 
 > on this box.
 > 
 > the current rate of kernel development is ~2000 changesets per month, so 
 > drawing the kernel history will get 3 seconds slower every day - it will 
 > exceed 1 minute in 20 days, so this will become a pressing issue quite 
 > soon i suspect.

Right, it is slow. From what I could understand with a bit of profiling, the problem is with the "text" canvas item for the boxes' labels. I guess libgnomecanvas isn't using Pango properly or something: it lookups the font with fontconfig each time I create such an item. I'm not sure what I can do about this.

Also, there's a -noaa option that draws an non-antialiased canvas : it's noticeably faster (and uglier too).

 > Ingo Molnar [Thu, 21 Apr 2005]:
 > another thing, when i 'zoom out' of the graph far away (so that the 
 > whole graph becomes visible on the screen), i'm getting lots of such 
 > error messages:
 > 
 >  *** attempt to put segment in horiz list twice

Yes, this message must come from one of the libraries (libart most probably)

 > Ingo Molnar [Thu, 21 Apr 2005]:
 > is the 'diff with ancestor' feature supposed to work at this early
 > stage? (it just does nothing when i click on it. It correctly
 > offers two ancestors for merge points, but does nothing there
 > either.)

It works with Petr Baudis' git-pasky (it calls `git diff'). I don't know how to do that with the canonical git.

Thanks for the suggestions,