Re: [PATCH] Lose perl dependency. (fwd)

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Another thing to think about is how --reverse should interact with --max-count and --skip (and perhaps --max-age but I am not sure about that one).

I think there are two very valid ways. You determine what you would spit out as if there is no --reverse, and then reverse the result, or you do not limit with them to get everthing, reverse the result and do the counting limit on that reversed list.

The former is probably more efficient (I do not think you would need to artificially make it limited like your patch does if you go this route), while the latter may or may not be more useful for what the end users would want to do.

For example, "git log -4" would show the topmost four commits. If you do the former, "git log --reverse -4" would give you the same four but in the chronological order (we usually show in the reverse order and --reverse would make it the forward order ;-), and you do not need to do the limiting for this. You need to capture them and reverse them yourself anyway, so not having to limit may not be a big deal, though.

If you do the latter, you would be able to get the first four commits in the chronological order. I do not think that is usually of much practical value (although people new to git always seem to ask "how do I get to the root commit" at least once), but there may be some valid uses for that kind of behaviour.