Re: Best way to generate a git tree containing only a subset of commits from another tree?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Mar 23, 2006, 03:43 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0603221932040.26286@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <442213F4.7040603@op5.se>

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> <sidenote>
> I've never understood what orthogonal means in this sense. "at a right angle"
> as in flagging for attention or the exactly counter-productive to what one
> should use?
> </sidenot>

No. Orthogonal in math may be literally "straight angle", but in non-geometric speak it means "independent" or "statistically unrelated".

See

	http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=orthogonal

and the two first definitions in particular.

Ie two issues (or, in this case, "branches") are orthogonal if they have nothing in common - they fix two totally independent things.

This is, btw, totally consistent with the geometric meaning of the word. Two vectors are orthogonal if they have no common component: the dot product is zero (ie the projection of one vector onto another is the null vector).

So if you see two lines of development as being "vectors" from a common source, when they have nothing in common, they are orthogonal.

Of course, the development space is neither three-dimensional nor euclidian, so it's a strange kind of vector, but still ;)

		Linus