Re: DEVEL: Help with feature implementation

From: Aiyee Bee <shane.880088.supw@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 18, 2021, 19:31 UTC
Message-ID: <C8MJ83LNOZ1Q.OCQKHOTGHKWF@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <60516c8b-adc0-18a5-ac26-b147b1857016@gmail.com>

Hi Antonio and Derrick!

> I think what you really want is --full-history --simplify-merges [1]. This
> will show the merges that "fork" the history into parallel tracks where
> at least two of them contain interesting commits.

It doesn't look like the implementation of --simplify-merges helps much here. That makes its decision on basis of the parents of the commit, which is simple to do as it's information attached freely to each commit. I think the problem here would be figuring out, given any commit, how many of its children are "relevant" commits.

> I'm actually working on something that does the opposite---it ignores
> the fork point when drawing the graph.  (I'm currently dog-fooding a
> partial implementation of this.)

That's a pretty interesting coincidence :)

Just to throw ideas out there, maybe we could attach another commit_list, children, to the commit metadata, so that all this becomes a little easier. But I guess that's be pretty impractical and inefficient.

Maybe a more practical (but still pretty unusual) solution would be adding counters to each commit that tell us how many times they have been traversed Through various histories?