Re: [PATCH 0/5] More ref logging

From: Sean <seanlkml@sympatico.ca>
Date: May 21, 2006, 05:09 UTC
Message-ID: <BAYC1-PASMTP110591AAE415FBD1523110AEA50@CEZ.ICE>
In-Reply-To: <20060521045146.GA8269@spearce.org>

On Sun, 21 May 2006 00:51:46 -0400 Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

> Any chance we could get some details on why so many tags were useful?
> You have a good argument here but I'm not sure how a better tag
> store could be structured.  :-)

It is a conversion from another SCM. So every one of the ~16K commits was tagged with the reference number taken from the original SCM. This has some very nice benefits in that you can refer to every commit in git by the original changeset #. For example, if someone reports a bug mentioning the original scm's reference id, you can say something like: "git show p4/1234" without having to go back to the old scm.

Also, qgit, gitk and gitweb display them nicely which can be helpful
during the conversion.  And if/when they're not needed any longer,
you just delete them without having to rewrite the history etc..

Show 6 quoted lines

> Yea - despite being the author of ref log I'm still slightly unhappy
> with the fact that it doesn't make reuse of existing GIT plumbing.
> But I'm sort of OK with that right now as you can't map two indexes
> into memory at once currently, nor is there a way to easily update
> multiple refs at once if the ref log must serialize access to create
> a string of trees and commits.

Well it's not the end of the world either way, and sometimes it's just better to implement a workable solution rather than wait for one that's theoretically cleaner. It just seemed like it was worth mentioning in case you saw a way to make it happen without a lot of grief.

Sean