From: david@lang.hm
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:17:38 GMT
Subject: Re: git guidance
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0712071259020.12607@asgard.lang.hm>
In-Reply-To: <200712071353.11654.a1426z@gawab.com>

On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Al Boldi wrote:

> Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>> So, to get to the bottom of this, which of the following workflows is it
>> you want git to support?
>>
>> ### WORKFLOW A ###
>> edit, edit, edit
>> edit, edit, edit
>> edit, edit, edit
>> Oops I made a mistake and need to hop back to "current - 12".
>> edit, edit, edit
>> edit, edit, edit
>> publish everything, similar to just tarring up your workdir and sending
>> out ### END WORKFLOW A ###
>>
>> ### WORKFLOW B ###
>> edit, edit, edit
>> ok this looks good, I want to save a checkpoint here
>> edit, edit, edit
>> looks good again. next checkpoint
>> edit, edit, edit
>> oh crap, back to checkpoint 2
>> edit, edit, edit
>> ooh, that's better. save a checkpoint and publish those checkpoints
>> ### END WORKFLOW B ###
>
> ### WORKFLOW C ###
> for every save on a gitfs mounted dir, do an implied checkpoint, commit, or
> publish (should be adjustable), on its privately created on-the-fly
> repository.
> ### END WORKFLOW C ###
>
> For example:
>
>  echo "// last comment on this file" >> /gitfs.mounted/file
>
> should do an implied checkpoint, and make these checkpoints immediately
> visible under some checkpoint branch of the gitfs mounted dir.
>
> Note, this way the developer gets version control without even noticing, and
> works completely transparent to any kind of application.

so if you have a script that does

echo "mail header" >tmpfile
echo "subject: >>tmpfile
echo >>tmpfile
echo "body" >>tmpfile

you want to have four seperate commits

what if you have a perl script

open outfile ">tmpfile";
print outfile "mail header\n";
print outfile "subject:\n\n";
print outfile "body\n";
close ourfile;

how many seperate commits do you think should take place?

what if $|=1 (unbuffered output, so that each print statement becomes 
visable to other programs immediatly)?

what if the file is changed via mmap? should each byte/word written to 
memory be a commit? or when the mmap is closed? or when the kernel happens 
to flush the page to disk?

'recording every change to a filesystem' is a very incomplete definition 
of a goal.

David Lang