Re: path limiting broken

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 17, 2006, 02:48 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0604161943360.3701@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0604170138470.824@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On Mon, 17 Apr 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> Since quite some time, I wanted to have a way to git-rev-list just the 
> revs between commit1 and commit2, i.e. all commits which are ancestors of 
> commit2, and which have commit1 as ancestor. With this, my task would have 
> been more than simple.

Yes. However, it's not trivial.

In fact, what you want is not what you claim you want. To be useful in general, you have to _also_ handle the case of "commit2" not beign a strict ancestor of "commit1". So what you actually want to do is

 - calculate the merge-head of cmit1 and cmit2 (and if there are multiple, 
   pick some "best" one).
 - pick the shortest path from the merge-head to the cmit1 (and, with a 
   flag, also pick the path from merge-head to cmit2 - sometimes you want 
   to see the whole path from one to the other, sometimes you might want 
   to see just the path from the last common point).

I suspect it ends up being not _that_ different from calculating the bisection point, but I haven't thought it through entirely.

		Linus