Re: [PATCH/RFC 2/2] Make path-limiting be incremental when possible.

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Mar 31, 2006, 19:44 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0603311139540.27203@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v1wwjvwz9.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:
> 
> > This is an absolutely huge deal for anything like "git log -- <pathname>", 
> > but also for some things that we don't do yet - like the "find where 
> > things changed" logic I've described elsewhere, where we want to find the 
> > previous revision that changed a file.
> >...
> > Btw, don't even bother testing this with the git archive. git itself is so 
> > small that parsing the whole revision history for it takes about a second 
> > even with path limiting.
> 
> By the way, I forgot to praise you ;-).  
> 
> Even on a fast machine, the old one was not very useful, but
> this one is _instantaneous_.  Very good job.

Indeed. It's why I'd really like this to be merged before 1.3.0 - it moves a certain class of problems from "it works" to "it's actually usable".

Now, the _real_ usage I foresee (which just wasn't practical before) is the interactive annotation thing - this won't help a _full_file_ annotate (which usually needs to go back to the very first version of a file anyway), but it should make it possible to play with an incremental one (the "graphical git-whatchanged" kind).

But even just the "git log" difference makes it worth it.

		Linus