From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:37:33 GMT
Subject: Re: newbie questions about git design and features (some wrt hg)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701301135290.3611@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701300906260.3611@woody.linux-foundation.org>



On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> We had this particular performance "anomaly" be discussed just the other 
> week. People seem to be so used to the "file ID" mentality that has its 
> roots in RCS etc, that they expect "git log <filename>" to somehow be 
> faster than "git log". In git, that's simply not true. History is *always* 
> seen as a "full repository history". There simply isn't anything else.

Side note: some people have talked about changing this by generating some 
kind of per-filename cache to make logging ops have an "accelerated" mode 
for the trivial cases.

So maybe git at some future date will have a special-case for a single 
filename, but that's definitely not the case today.

			Linus