Re: Best way to generate a git tree containing only a subset of commits from another tree?

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
> <sidenote>
> I've never understood what orthogonal means in this sense. "at a right angle"
> as in flagging for attention or the exactly counter-productive to what one
> should use?
> </sidenot>

No. Orthogonal in math may be literally "straight angle", but in 
non-geometric speak it means "independent" or "statistically unrelated".

See 

	http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=orthogonal

and the two first definitions in particular.

Ie two issues (or, in this case, "branches") are orthogonal if they have 
nothing in common - they fix two totally independent things.

This is, btw, totally consistent with the geometric meaning of the word. 
Two vectors are orthogonal if they have no common component: the dot 
product is zero (ie the projection of one vector onto another is the null 
vector).

So if you see two lines of development as being "vectors" from a common 
source, when they have nothing in common, they are orthogonal.

Of course, the development space is neither three-dimensional nor 
euclidian, so it's a strange kind of vector, but still ;)

		Linus