Re: gitk feature request..

Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> writes:

Well, we do not design things in advance but tend to let things evolve, which probably is a bad habit but I am not sure how else we can avoid overdesigning before knowing the needs.

The existing state-keeping programs seem to keep their stuff immediately under $GIT_DIR. Examples are:

	.git/description (gitweb)
        .git/cvs-authors (cvsimport)
        .git/gitcvs.<branch>.sqlite (cvsserver)

So, .git/gitk-<foo> (or .git/gitk/<bar>) would be in line with others. We _might_ want to have a standard plan to keep Porcelains stepping on each other's toes, and probably migrating everybody to .git/aux/{common,gitcvs,gitk,...}/<foo> would be a sane thing to do. description and cvs-authors could probably be shared across Porcelains, so I do not think we mind leaving them in the current place or throw them in .git/aux/common/

Having said that, is the gitk view supposed to be shared across users of a single repository?

If you imagine yourself logging into kernel.org (perhaps X forwarded over ssh to your local machine) and browsing /pub/scm/git/git.git/, the repository itself would not be writable by you. Even if it were, I do not think you would want me to reuse the view you used from there next time I did the same on the same repository.

It might make sense to give --state=dir/ parameter to gitk and tell it to use that directory to keep persistent data. Also I seem to recall you already have one file under $HOME/ to make window geometry or something persistent.