Re: Can I have this, pretty please?

[Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>]

David Kastrup wrote:
> Mapping a repository into newsgroups (one per branch head?), complete
> with threads, references, header display, article fetch (by
> git-format-patch), Message Ids (=commit id) is much more
> straightforward than creating an HTML server.  And it means that
> everybody can use his favorite newsreader for navigating a repository.
>   

The news data model has one big problem. It is a tree structure (or 
rather, a set of tree structures). But git's ancestry graphs are not 
trees; a commit can have multiple parents as well as multiple children, 
and branches can join each other multiple times (via merges) as well as 
split off indefinitely.

I realize that you can give a list of parent message IDs in a news 
header, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that all existing 
newsreaders expect that list to be a linear series of messages going 
back toward the root of the thread (since that's all that ever occurs in 
real netnews), rather than an arbitrary DAG.

Not saying it's a worthless idea, but I bet you will not be able to get 
an accurate display of a repository's history using a news reader 
without modifying it to deal with more complex ancestry structures.

-Steve