Re: kernel.org now has gitweb installed

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 28, 2005, 22:12 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504281506500.18901@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <42715B30.6010705@zytor.com>

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> I thought about this for a few seconds (I really should do that more 
> often...) and realized what it is you want: you want a primary search 
> criterion which is "when did event X become visible to me", where "me" 
> in this case is the web tool.  That is not repository information, but 
> it is perfectly possible for the webtool to be aware of what it has 
> previously seen and when.

This is exactly what rev-tree does, and how things like the commit emails happen.

The problem is that since it's observer-dependent, it's not generally very useful for something like a web interface. You really don't want to keep track of what everybody has seen ;)

What you _can_ try to keep track of is what some "special observer" has seen. That's really quite complicated too, but if you do a web interface, the "special observer" is yourself. Then at every time you mirror the thing, you need to remember what your "last view" was, and you base your "new view" on the fact that you know what you saw last time, so you know which things are new to _you_.

But it really means that each web interface ends up showing quite _different_ information, and the particular information you show ends up being dependent on when you started looking at the tree (and how often you re-generate new views).

This really is why "time" is interesting. Because it's simple, and observers can agree about it (not because the time was the same, but because each observer just agrees that time is "whatever was reported as the local time at the point the action happened").

		Linus