Re: git-fast-import

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> Ah! I overlooked that feature. Certainly, this makes gfi (could we please 
> call it "fast-import", please?) very useful for history rewriting 
> purposed.

Heh.  I was actually sort of thinking of renaming it git-gfi.  :)

git-fast-import is just too long to write.  And for some reason I
have been writing it a lot lately.  #git, email, git-fast-export's
manual page (which is now also the largest manual page in all
of Git!).

But of course the better name is git-fast-import.  Stealing a
three-letter non-hypen-containing name for a tool the user never
is meant to run by hand is just evil.


I haven't even tried to use fast-import for general history
rewriting, let alone benchmarked it against something like git-split
or Cogito's rewriting tool, but I'd be willing to be that fast-import
is faster.  The internal ``cache'' that it uses for the tree
construction is lightweight enough that gfi can probably recreate
only the modified trees, compress and hash them, and output what
it needs to, in the time it takes to fork+exec git-commit-tree.

-- 
Shawn.