Re: [PATCH 19/19] gitweb: Remove creating directory for temporary files

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

>    "get-following" is inherently a very expensive operation, so
>    I would suggest not doing this.  It seems that nobody uses
>    these two subs yet, so probably it is better to yank them
>    before they cause damages.

A bit of clarification.  gitk has preceding/following but unlike
gitweb it has three things that go in favor of having it.

 - gitk can afford to use as much CPU as the user throw at it,
   since it runs locally.

 - gitk finds preceding/following in the background so the user
   does not have to wait, and it is done while it gets the list
   of commits which it needs to do anyway.

 - what gitk reads from rev-list persists while the user keeps
   it around.  when the user walks around inspecting different
   commits, the cost for computing preceding/following is
   amortized.  gitweb cannot do this unless it somehow caches
   this information, but you just spent significant effort to
   make it unnecessary for gitweb to write anything on the
   filesystem, so introducing caching is somewhat going
   backwards.