Re: how to display file history?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: May 15, 2006, 18:03 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605151055080.3866@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <e5bfff550605151022m7b9ddcd9y53cd745e16ff6b22@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, 15 May 2006, Marco Costalba wrote:

> 
> Well, it works but the nice boundary circles are not shown, and qgit
> always adds  --boundary to command line args to feed git-rev-list, but
> in this case it seems the --boundary option didn't do his job.

Well, it did do it's job, but you expected different counting priorities than git-rev-list actually gives you.

For the "limit by number" case, the commit counting counts _both_ "primary" commits and "boundary" commits, and will limit the total output to the number specified.

qgit would seem to prefer to have the commit counting only affect the "primary" commits, and not the "boundary" ones at all. Which might be sensible, but it's not the semantics it has now.

gitk doesn't care, because it uses the boundary commits just as hints.

I _think_ gitk is correct here, and qgit is being too strict in its semantic understanding of what the boundary commits mean. But I think so mostly because it would actually be pretty hard to do otherwise (ie the git-rev-list commit counting is largely defined by it's _implementation_, not necessarily by what you want it to do ;)

		Linus