From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Steven Grimm Subject: Re: Can I have this, pretty please? Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:21:10 +0800 Message-ID: <46BF1756.5070305@midwinter.com> References: <85ir7kq42k.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: git@vger.kernel.org To: David Kastrup X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Sun Aug 12 16:21:26 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git@gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1IKEJh-0004I4-Sf for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:21:18 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758964AbXHLOVP (ORCPT ); Sun, 12 Aug 2007 10:21:15 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1758876AbXHLOVO (ORCPT ); Sun, 12 Aug 2007 10:21:14 -0400 Received: from tater2.midwinter.com ([216.32.86.91]:46320 "HELO midwinter.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1754660AbXHLOVO (ORCPT ); Sun, 12 Aug 2007 10:21:14 -0400 Received: (qmail 28374 invoked from network); 12 Aug 2007 14:21:13 -0000 Comment: DomainKeys? See http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=200606; d=midwinter.com; b=iVBF3Ztat5f78y8W+kewTNQ87d3vO4ovn0+tn7tXRc78o0V2EoOqXCpq1Gn0+PpW ; Received: from localhost (HELO sgrimm-mbp.local) (koreth@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 12 Aug 2007 14:21:12 -0000 User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Macintosh/20070728) In-Reply-To: <85ir7kq42k.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: 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