Re: Any objectsions to enhancing git-log to show tags/branch heads?

[Peter Baumann <peter.baumann@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 08:45:55AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> I've recently noticed that I'm often firing up gitk for no other purpose
> than to see which changesets have which tags and branch heads.  Often
> I'll fire up gitk, quickly look at the tags/branches, and then kill it
> before it's done parsing the repository, resulting in python errors as
> it dies.
> 
> So I'm wondering why we haven't arranged to have git-log show this
> information, and whether there would be any objections if "git-log"
> showed something like this:
> 
> commit 7d5021d2ef5d414908d8e4db26c324c1de19f9f1
> Head: tytso-patches-20070223
> Author: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
> Date:   Fri Feb 23 14:46:01 2007 -0500
> 
> Cherry pick "unload head on shutdown" patch
> 
> ...
> 
> commit c8f71b01a50597e298dc3214a2f2be7b8d31170c
> Tag: v2.6.21-rc1
> Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>
> Date:   Tue Feb 20 20:32:30 2007 -0800
> 
>     Linux 2.6.21-rc1
> 
> Would there be objections in adding this to --pretty=medium (i.e., the
> default), or would it be better to add something like tihs to
> --pretty=full or --pretty=fuller?
> 
> The only reason why I could imagine not doing this by default would be a
> potential performance problem if there were thousands of heads or branch
> heads.
> 
> 						- Ted

I'll do this gitk jump very often, too. Just to get the big picture where my
branches are (inside the commit graph). As they stay normaly on the tip, I
exit gitk long before it reached the root commit. What I'd like to have is
something which shows me _visually_ the the branches, e.g.

master
| next			commit comment for next
o  |		commit comment for master~1
|  o			commit comment for next~1
o  |	[ ... guess whats next :-)		you get the idea ...]
|  o
|  |
o /
|

tig comes near it, but it only linerarises the branches, so you can't see
where there was a mergepoint/fork. I'd really like these visuallization of
the commit graph in some of the text viewers. I normally don't care about
the _full_ commit text, only if I visually understand what's happening I'm
looking at the individual commits and the patches.

There was some tool (can't remember its name or who it wrote; but posted
here on this list) which visualizes  the relation horizontaly and not
vertically as shown above but has a limit of only displaying around 25 (not
sure about this number; but definitly below 30 commits) which was at least
displaying the commit graph which is _really_ really what I need.

-Peter