Re: Add "--show-all" revision walker flag for debugging

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> At the same time, I'm still not really convinced we need to add the 
> redundant info. I do think I *should* have designed it that way to start 
> with (and I thought so two years ago - blaah), so the strongest reason for 
> "we should add generation numbers" at least for me is that I actually 
> think it's a GoodThing(tm) to have.
> 
> But adding it is a pretty invasive thing, and would force people to 
> upgrade (it really isn't backwards compatible - old versions of git would 
> immediately refuse to touch archives with even just a single top commit 
> that has a generation number in it, unless we'd hide it at the end of the 
> buffer and just uglify things in general).

Repeating myself: for one, I'm rather against any such generation 
headers in the commit object, and so is Dscho.

Why?  Because it doesn't have to live in the commit object at all.

Just like we have a locally managed pack index file, we can have a 
locally managed "index of generations" file just fine.


Nicolas