Re: Regarding gitk

[Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>]

Hi Tejun,

>  First of all, thanks a lot for gitk.  I was working on something using
> graphviz/pygtk to do about the same thing for a couple of weeks (and got
> pretty far with it) but ditched it as gitk seemed much better.  I really
> love how gitk shows the commit graph. :-)

Yes, I was pleased with how it turned out.

>  As I don't wanna ditch any more of my time, it would be great if you
> let me know what you're currently working on, so that I can coordinate
> with you.  Here are the things I have on mind.
> 
> * integrate two-way diff view w/ diff map into gitk from mgdiff.

I guess mgdiff and dirdiff do very similar things, although dirdiff
can display the diffs between up to 5 trees (limited mainly by the
number of easily distinguishable colors between red and green).  Doing
3-way diffs is useful for most merges (diffing the output vs. the
inputs) and for diffing two arbitrary commits (diffing the two vs. the
nearest common ancestor).

I recently changed dirdiff to be able to diff git commits with each
other or the working directory, and I was intending to add a way to
invoke that from gitk.

> * show the current cache and working files at the head of graph

Interesting idea.  I had mostly been thinking of gitk in terms of the
way I use it, which is to help me follow what others are doing rather
than looking at what I have done.

> * demand-load commits as the user scrolls down the graph

It would be nice to at least be a bit asynchronous, so that the graph
is drawn as the commits are read, rather than having to wait for all
the commits are read before anything is drawn.  I need to hack
git-rev-tree, I guess.

>  I wrote a commit viewing utility (gitkdiff) modified from mgdiff two
> weeks ago so I'm quite familiar with mgdiff source, and implemented
> demand-loading of commits in my own project in python, but writing a
> separate c utility with the same algorithm wouldn't take that much time.

Does that algorithm let you say "commits reachable from A but not from
B" like git-rev-tree does?

Regards,
Paul.