Re: [PATCH v4 0/4] Add --no-ahead-behind to status

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 10, 2018, 07:47 UTC
Message-ID: <20180110074701.GB16315@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <c19f6469-190a-33e7-20a2-fcb17b8e45d9@gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 09:29:31AM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > > But even still, finding small answers quickly and accurately and punting
> > > to "really far, I didn't bother to compute it" on the big ones would be
> > > an improvement over always punting.
> > Indeed. The longer I think about it, the more I like the "100+ commits
> > apart" idea.
> > 
> 
> Again, I strongly suggest we drop this approach because it will be more pain
> than it is worth.

To be clear, which approach are we talking about? I think there are three options:

  1. The user tells us not to bother computing real ahead/behind values.
     We always say "same" or "not the same".

  2. The user tells us not to bother computing ahead/behind values
     with more effort than N. After traversing N commits without getting
     an answer, we say "same" or "not the same". But we may sometimes
     give a real answer if we found it within N.

  3. The user tells us not to spend more effort than N. After traversing
     N commits we try to make some partial statement based on
     generations (or commit timestamps as a proxy for them).

I agree that (3) is probably not going to be useful enough in the general case to merit the implementation effort and confusion. But is there anything wrong with (2)?

-Peff