Re: kernel.org now has gitweb installed

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 28, 2005, 18:55 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504281149330.18901@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <1114680199.12012.363.camel@baythorne.infradead.org>

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, David Woodhouse wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> Walk the tree once. For each commit, count the number of _children_.
> That's not hard -- each new commit you find below HEAD has one child to
> start with, then you increment that figure by one each time you find
> another path to the same commit.
> 
> When printing, you walk the tree depth-first, remote-parent-first.

No, that really sucks.

Realize that "remote" and "local" parents don't really exist. They have no meaning. I've considered sorting the parents by the sha1 name, but I've left that for now.

Anyway, the reason remote and local don't matter is that if somebody else merges with me, and I just pull the result without having any changes in my tree, we just "fast-forward" to that other side, because otherwise you can never "converge" on anything (people merging each others trees would always create a new commit, for no good reason).

What does that mean? It means that my local tree now became the _remote_ parent, even though it was always local to my tree.

So if you look at remote vs local, you're _guaranteed_ to mess up. It has no meaning.

So what you can do is:
 - if there is one parent, just always walk straight down
 - if it's a merge, add the parents _in_date_order_ to the list of things 
   to do, and then pop the most recent one.

Really. You say that dates don't matter, but they _do_ actually matter a lot more than "remote/local" does. At least they have meaning.

		Linus