Re: Efficient retrieval of commit log info

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, Eirik Bj?rsn?s wrote:

> I'm developing a piece of software that grabs logs from various types of 
> SCMs and presents (hopefully) useful information about the history.
> 
> My current approach with Git is do a "git clone --n" and then parse the 
> output of "git log". To check for updates I do a "git pull" followed by 
> a new "git log".
> 
> This approach works fine, but cloning the whole repository just to get 
> the change log seems like a somewhat inefficient use of bandwidth and 
> storage.
> 
> What I would like to do is to fetch just the change log information
> from the remote repository.
> 
> (Using the "CVS done right" tool I can do this with: "svn log --xml -v
> -r<last, HEAD> http://svn.example.com/")
> 
> I haven't found a way to do this using the Git command line tools.

It is not possible to get just the metadata.  Remember, svn can do it only 
since the repository is purely remote.  And git is a SCM (source code 
management system), not a CMV (commit metadata viewer).

You might be able to cobble up something that works accessing gitweb, but 
it might be even more inefficient.

Ciao,
Dscho