Re: gitk and git-gui, was Re: FFmpeg considering GIT

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: May 8, 2007, 15:33 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0705080830380.3974@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0705081311550.4167@racer.site>

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> 
> It might be a much better idea to write something a la git-fetch--tool, 
> which is a helper in C (thus very fast and memory efficient), outputting 
> easily parseable data.

Well, we actually do have that. "git log" (or "git-rev-list") really does all the heavy lifting. The reason you can do things like "gitk --merge" is not because gitk itself has _any_ idea about anything, but because it just passes the arguments down to git-rev-list (and hopefully soon git log), which really does all the complex stuff.

But gitk still ends up having a big memory footpring, simply because if you get the data for a few hundred thousand commits (with commit messages etc), and have to keep track of the relationships between them, you are going to easily use hundreds of megs of memory.

		Linus