Re: Walking commits from the first

[Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:05 AM, Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Pavan Kumar Sunkara
>
> The history is useful for understanding how something came to be -
> commits followed backwards down one merge branch will tend to have
> some semantic relationship to each other unless your committers are on
> acid. Trying to comprehend the evolution of history by replaying it
> forwards and keeping track of n parallel threads of development as
> they diverge seems like an unnecessarily complicated way of trying to
> comprehend the world.
>

That said, of course, git once had an option to rev-list that I
contributed (--merge-order) that attempted to create the best possible
linear history by performing a topological sort that minimised the
number of "jumps" between semantically unrelated commits in the linear
order. The algorithm was kind of cool (based as it was on a
conservation of mass analogy), but it eventually got stripped out for
various eminently understandable reasons (like no-one was using it, I
wasn't maintaining it and it was the only remaining use of a
dependency on the open-ssl infinite precision integer arithmetic
libraries that complicated the build).

git rev-list --topo-order will do a topological sort that guarantees
that you never visit a commit before visiting all its ancestors.


> jon.
>
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