Re: Can I have this, pretty please?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 12, 2007, 18:38 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708121135050.30176@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <85ir7kq42k.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

>
> And then it struck me: Emacs has a very efficient browser for linked
> one-line information that can be expanded into complete changesets
> with diffs inside.  It is called "Gnus".  A newsreader.

A newsreader is mis-designed for all the same reasons SVN is misdesigned: it sees the messages (commits) as a _tree_.

Anybody who sees development as a tree is totally bogus by definition. It sees things forking off, but it doesn't see them merging. That's a fundamnetal and unfixable design bug.

Of course, for news, that's ok (it might be *nice* if you could reply to two messages and see it as a merge, but that's not how things work), so it wasn't a design mistake for _that_.

But to visualize a history, it's useless. Merges are as important as forks (arguably *more* important). "Forgetting" about merges is bad.

			Linus