Re: [RFC] git-split: Split the history of a git repository by subdirectories and ranges

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> > Although I think that somebody (Dscho?) also had a patch to remove 
> > multiple identical parents, which he claimed could happen with 
> > simplification otherwise. I didn't look any closer at it.
> 
> IIRC It only happened when full history was wished for, _and_ path 
> limiting. And Junio said that in that case, culling identical parents 
> would be the wrong thing to do.

Yeah, with full history, you might as well keep the trivially identical 
parents too. In the "nice rewrite", you'd get rid of them, but you'd get 
rid of them not because they are trivially identical, but because they are 
just the trivial case of "one parent totally dominates the other".

Sadly, while it may be the _trivial_ case in --full-history, it's probably 
not even the common case, at least if you have lots of merges (because you 
end up having one parent point to one merge, and the other to another, and 
you need to simplify things in multiple passes).

			Linus