From: Linus Torvalds Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:38:53 GMT Subject: Re: Can I have this, pretty please? Message-ID: 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