Re: gitk and git-gui, was Re: FFmpeg considering GIT

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> It might be a much better idea to write something a la git-fetch--tool, 
> which is a helper in C (thus very fast and memory efficient), outputting 
> easily parseable data. 

Well, we actually do have that. "git log" (or "git-rev-list") really does 
all the heavy lifting. The reason you can do things like "gitk --merge" is 
not because gitk itself has _any_ idea about anything, but because it just 
passes the arguments down to git-rev-list (and hopefully soon git log), 
which really does all the complex stuff.

But gitk still ends up having a big memory footpring, simply because if 
you get the data for a few hundred thousand commits (with commit messages 
etc), and have to keep track of the relationships between them, you are 
going to easily use hundreds of megs of memory.

		Linus