From: Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:43:25 GMT Subject: Re: Best way to generate a git tree containing only a subset of commits from another tree? Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <442213F4.7040603@op5.se> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Andreas Ericsson wrote: > > > 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? > 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