Re: git-show --stat on first commit

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006, Peter Baumann wrote:
> 
> And I think handling this behaviour as a config option is the right thing,
> because most of the time if someone imports a project into git he
> will import the whole history, especially if he is using one of the
> cvs/svn importers. A "halfway import" as seen in the kernel repo is a
> special case and it is unlikely seen again.

Actually, I see "halfway imports" all the time.

I've found that some of the git things like "git grep" etc are _so_ 
convenient, that whenever I get a source tar-ball for _anything_, I tend 
to do

	zcat < xyz-123.tar.gz | tar xvf -
	cd xyz-123
	git init-db
	git add
	git commit -m "Import xyz-123"

the first thing I do. Even if I never end up changing anything in that 
archive, it's just that convenient (and fast - sure, doing the hashing and 
compression means that the "git add" might not be truly instantaneous, but 
it's definitely fast enough that for almost all projects, doing this is so 
cheap that you don't need to care).

And _especially_ for things like this, being able to do "git log -p" to 
check the small trivial one-liners that I might do is nice (it happens - 
my pine4.64 import these days has three small commits to add buildnotes 
and handle UTF-8 input etc).

And again, that's when you do _not_ want to see "--root". Because it's 
never what you actually care about.

So I think imports are important. They may be throw-away trees like mine, 
but they're still useful.