Re: Specifying revisions in the future

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 5, 2012, 21:57 UTC
Message-ID: <m3ehu9kknw.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <m21uq9x8q2.fsf@igel.home>

Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:
> 
> > "the successor of <commit>", OTOH, is not well defined, since there can
> > be several successors, and one can't order them reliably (you can't
> > really know the set of successors, because they can exist in different
> > repositories).
> 
> Yet it would be nice to have a concise notation for "the nth successor
> of <commit> towards <commit>" (using --first-parent ordering when
> ambiguous).

First, "the nth successor"... from which refs? Commit objects have pointers in one direction only, from commit to its ancestors (earlier commits).

Second, `--first-parent' won't help here. Take for example the following situation:

   ---X<---*<---.<---A
            \
             \--.<---B

X+3 is A or B? Note that pointers point _to_ '*' commit, so there is not first or second here - no natural ordering like in the case of commit parents.

-- 
Jakub Narebski