Re: [PATCH/RFC 2/2] Make path-limiting be incremental when possible.

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:
> 
> > This is an absolutely huge deal for anything like "git log -- <pathname>", 
> > but also for some things that we don't do yet - like the "find where 
> > things changed" logic I've described elsewhere, where we want to find the 
> > previous revision that changed a file.
> >...
> > Btw, don't even bother testing this with the git archive. git itself is so 
> > small that parsing the whole revision history for it takes about a second 
> > even with path limiting.
> 
> By the way, I forgot to praise you ;-).  
> 
> Even on a fast machine, the old one was not very useful, but
> this one is _instantaneous_.  Very good job.

Indeed. It's why I'd really like this to be merged before 1.3.0 - it moves 
a certain class of problems from "it works" to "it's actually usable".

Now, the _real_ usage I foresee (which just wasn't practical before) is 
the interactive annotation thing - this won't help a _full_file_ annotate 
(which usually needs to go back to the very first version of a file 
anyway), but it should make it possible to play with an incremental one 
(the "graphical git-whatchanged" kind).

But even just the "git log" difference makes it worth it. 

		Linus