Re: [PATCH] merge-base

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2005, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
>
> I wrote a pretty dumb program that will find some common ancestor for a
> pair of commits. It finds the one which is closest to one of the commits
> by number of generations. This is, at least, not strictly worse than any
> other common ancestor, at least (like picking the original release would
> be).
> 
> It wouldn't be too hard to do this much with rev-tree, but should be
> easier to extend.

I agree. But I did the silly "common revision tracking" part slightly
differently and in particular I already made fsck and rev-tree use the 
same exact code.

Also, I don't see why you did the "common parent" thing as part of the
"library", since that really does seem to be a very specific to this 
problem, and neither fsck nor rev-tree really wants it. 

Also, the date parsing really is a separate issue from the revision 
tracking (fsck does not want date parsing, but rev-tool does), so I think 
you might want to do for date parsing what I just did for the revision.h 
thing? No point in tying them together.

So could I ask you to re-factor it and base it on my current tree? Make 
the "merge-base" program have that common parent thing in it, and factor 
out the common date parsing into "parse-date.c" or something?

		Linus