Re: git-rev-list feature request

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Mar 10, 2006, 03:56 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0603091950360.18022@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <17424.53563.622642.738307@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, Paul Mackerras wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> 
> It would be nice also to be able to combine that with the existing
> ability to output a dense graph containing the commits that modify a
> specified set of files or directories.
> 
> In other words, I would like to be able to select any combination of
> (a) some explicitly specified commits
> (b) commits that have a reference
> (c) commits that affect specified files or directories
> 
> and have git-rev-list output a graph that shows the relationship of
> those commits.
> 
> Possible?

Yeah. I _think_ what you want is

 - phase 1: generate the current graph that we already do for

	git-rev-list --all ^cmit

 - phase 2: start at "cmit", and mark everything that refers to it as 
   "show me" (including "cmit" itself, which was originally marked 
   uninteresting)

So phase 1 already exists and was the hard part. phase 2 is just walking the graph (that is now all in memory) from "cmit" using the "object->refs" reverse references that got built up during phase 1.

The only question is how to show the ref-names, or, more properly, what to do when we have a ref-name, but the commit it points to wasn't interesting because it didn't change the set of files we used to determine interest...

And where to find the sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hhelpful soul to actually do the work.

		Linus