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

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

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.

It might be interesting to extend that to do the "five best" common
parents according to date (making sure to remove the trivial cases: a
parent of a common parent is always itself a common parent, but such a
common grandparent is obviously always uninteresting).

Then, for that small set of parents, doing something much more involved
(generation counting is fairly simple, but possibly not as good a
"goodness" match as tree-diff or something).

		Linus