Re: git bisect on multiple cores

From: David Symonds <dsymonds@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 8, 2008, 12:50 UTC
Message-ID: <ee77f5c20804080550h251918d6n73d73a1de8ec6c09@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <dbbf25900804080358o6b1ada20pfb94f68f06a23f83@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 8:58 PM, A B <gentosaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> git bisect is really cool. I use it for the first time.
>  Just a thought, if you have a multiple core computer, can't you make
>  git build new versions in the background while testing the previuos
>  version? Alright, if you build 2 versions, one of them will never be
>  tested, but you will perhaps save some time by letting it build in the
>  background?

Git is used to track more than just source code that can be "built", and git bisect can be used for more than just tracking down bugs.

I'm not convinced the considerable extra complexity would be worthwhile. You'd have to have git bisect do checkouts to new temporary directories, track them and clean them up.

It might be interesting if you approached it as a tri-section or a general N-section where you try to divide the interval into N parts and concurrently test N-1 commits. But really, do you find git bisect all that slow in practice? You probably have a reasonable guess as to where a regression has come in, and so even 1000 revisions needs at most 10 bisections to find the culprit.

Dave.