Re: Efficient retrieval of commit log info

> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, Eirik Bj?rsn?s wrote:
> 
> > I'm developing a piece of software that grabs logs from various types of 
> > SCMs and presents (hopefully) useful information about the history.
> > 
> > My current approach with Git is do a "git clone --n" and then parse the 
> > output of "git log". To check for updates I do a "git pull" followed by 
> > a new "git log".
> > 
> > This approach works fine, but cloning the whole repository just to get 
> > the change log seems like a somewhat inefficient use of bandwidth and 
> > storage.
> > 
> > What I would like to do is to fetch just the change log information
> > from the remote repository.
> > 
> > (Using the "CVS done right" tool I can do this with: "svn log --xml -v
> > -r<last, HEAD> http://svn.example.com/")
> > 
> > I haven't found a way to do this using the Git command line tools.
> 
> It is not possible to get just the metadata.  Remember, svn can do it only 
> since the repository is purely remote.  And git is a SCM (source code 
> management system), not a CMV (commit metadata viewer).
> 
> You might be able to cobble up something that works accessing gitweb, but 
> it might be even more inefficient.