Re: Can I have this, pretty please?

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 12, 2007, 20:30 UTC
Message-ID: <857io0mr6v.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708121255230.30176@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:
>> >
>> > So, use "git log --pretty=oneline" instead, which doesn't have the
>> > expense.
>> 
>> Yes, like managing a manual with grep is all one needs.  git log
>> --pretty=oneline provides just the commit headers, but offers no way
>> to jump into the commits themselves and back easily.
>
> You misunderstand.
>
> I was suggesting you do a *tool* that bases its listing on 
> --pretty=oneline, and then goes from there.

Full agreement here. My tool was going to pass those lines off as article headers.

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> If you don't show the graph anyway, all the complex and expensive
> things that "git-rev-list --topo-order" does is pretty much totally
> useless.  You're going to show the commits as a list anyway, and
> then when you *select* one commit for closer inspection, you can
> then try to do a better job at that point of doing the reachability
> (ie parenthood is trivial, and the branch reachability is cheap if
> it's close to the tip of the tree, which it would almost always be).

Quite so. I was thinking of doing such a tool inside of Emacs (after all, Emacs is the most extensive junkyard for prototyping editing solutions that can be had) and was weighing options for what kind of stuff I would need to be doing to have it work efficiently, offering access to everything without wasting unnecessary time on those things that don't interest me at the moment.

And what I came up with had far too many similarities to what a newsreader does... So my first reaction to that idea was to post to the Gnus Usenet group proposing some sort of virtual server method for Gnus (it already has more than a dozen for managing news, mail, various mail and news spools, diaries, Google, Slashdot, files, directories, virtual groups...). But it occured to me that the mapping of information to NNTP is actually so straightforward that the idea seemed exploitable not just by Emacs users.

> But if you have a client that is incremental anyway, almost all of
> that goes away.

Yup.  Omniscience is overrated in computer science.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum