Re: GSoC draft proposal: Line-level history browser

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
To: Bo Yang <struggleyb.nku@gmail.com>
Cc: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>,
	Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>,
	git@vger.kernel.org, Jens Lehmann <Jens.Lehmann@web.de>
Subject: Re: GSoC draft proposal: Line-level history browser
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:10:34 -0700 (PDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <m3vdcei3bb.fsf@localhost.localdomain> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <41f08ee11003291952r467601b1o970ce3be802d8521@mail.gmail.com>

Bo Yang <struggleyb.nku@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 2:42 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> wrote:
> >
> > Is this really the right use-case?  AFAICT the answer to the implied
> > question is given by simply running 'git blame -M 93fc05e:pretty.c'.
> >
> > (Coming up with a better example should be easy; the way I currently
> > think of the feature means that it will mostly replace git-blame for
> > me...)
> 
> I will cite the same example below in the scenario. :)

By the way, it would be good to find an example with "evil merge",
which means that the change to given line(s) is in the merge commit
itself.  Correctly simplifying history in such case might be
non-trivial.

Another example that it would be good to have is "history split"
example, which means the case where some lines were consolidated
(e.g. after refactoring), and some of lines in "preimage" come
from different lines of history.

This would help with writing tests for this feature (compare tests
for blame), although they are not in my opinion necessary for the
proposal itself.

I hope that all this cases would fall naturally from the
implementation.

[...]
> > Push the code somewhere public as you go, even between feature
> > completions.  Post RFCs once you have workable features so people can
> > comment.  Generally try to be visible.
> >
> > Bonus points if you can think of something visible to do during the
> > period where you look at code,
> 
> Yeah, really is a good point. And I have tried to play around on
> github.com and try to set up a http://github.com/byang/my_git for this
> purpose. :)

my_git is not very descriptive... well, unless you would do your work
on GSoC2010/line-level-history-browser branch, or something like that.

It might be good idea to have repo.or.cz as an additional repository,
as a fork of git.git repo, and with SoC / GSoC labels.  See
http://repo.or.cz/w/git.git/forks?t=soc

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git