Re: Git commit generation numbers

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 22, 2011, 09:30 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD0FG47D0hV8ifj1p7bRfEXJ7Ez3mTw4Yv-KUWXPJnWLOg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <j0a9te$vcv$1@dough.gmane.org>

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 12:40 AM, Pēteris Kļaviņš <klavins@netspace.net.au> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

>
> The beauty of Git is that no two copies of a Git repository as a whole are
> the same:  some people make shallow copies;  others prune away all branches
> except for the one they are interested in;  yet others graft together
> multiple original repositories.  The upshot is that two copies of the same
> repository may end up having different commits as their root commits, and so
> the generation numbers computed for their repositories would be different.
>  Indeed, the shallow repository copy could later be filled out with
> additional underlying commits, and so on.

Not only people want different repos, but with their own repo they want different "views" (or "virtual graph") of it.

> Given this context, I can't see the value in fixing generation numbers
> within commits.  In my mind generation numbers are extremely useful
> transient helper objects in every Git repository but they have no meaning
> outside that repository, sort of like GIT_WORK_TREE.

It's not even per repository that they have a meaning, it's per "view" of the commit graph.

Thanks, Christian.