Re: Can I have this, pretty please?

From: Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>
Date: Aug 12, 2007, 14:21 UTC
Message-ID: <46BF1756.5070305@midwinter.com>
In-Reply-To: <85ir7kq42k.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

David Kastrup wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Mapping a repository into newsgroups (one per branch head?), complete
> with threads, references, header display, article fetch (by
> git-format-patch), Message Ids (=commit id) is much more
> straightforward than creating an HTML server.  And it means that
> everybody can use his favorite newsreader for navigating a repository.
>

The news data model has one big problem. It is a tree structure (or rather, a set of tree structures). But git's ancestry graphs are not trees; a commit can have multiple parents as well as multiple children, and branches can join each other multiple times (via merges) as well as split off indefinitely.

I realize that you can give a list of parent message IDs in a news header, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that all existing newsreaders expect that list to be a linear series of messages going back toward the root of the thread (since that's all that ever occurs in real netnews), rather than an arbitrary DAG.

Not saying it's a worthless idea, but I bet you will not be able to get an accurate display of a repository's history using a news reader without modifying it to deal with more complex ancestry structures.

-Steve