Re: [1/5] Parsing code in revision.h

[Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:
> > 
> > Someone started the avalanche by adding date to the structure. Of
> > course, date is smaller, but it leads people (including me) out of the
> > way.
> 
> Yeah, the naming and the structure comes from "rev-tree.c", so there's a 
> bit of historical baggage already. 
> 
> Anyway, I don't think you should need it. I cleaned up things a bit, and 
> wrote a really simple "merge-base" thing that does base the "best" hit on 
> date, which ends up probably doing the right thing in practice.

Yours reads the whole commit history; I intentionally wrote mine to
only read as far back as turns out to be necessary. I think that looking
at the whole history is going to be impractical when you're trying to
merge in a bunch of patches against the latest release, even if you pull
the history out of a cache. When it's one step on one side and a dozen on
the other, it matters a whole lot if there's a year of history behind the
common ancestor(s).

So I still think it's best to have a non-recursive commit parser, and do
the recursion only as needed for the operation under consideration.

	-Daniel
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