On Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 09:29:31AM -0500, Derrick Stolee wrote:
> > > But even still, finding small answers quickly and accurately and punting
> > > to "really far, I didn't bother to compute it" on the big ones would be
> > > an improvement over always punting.
> > Indeed. The longer I think about it, the more I like the "100+ commits
> > apart" idea.
> >
>
> Again, I strongly suggest we drop this approach because it will be more pain
> than it is worth.
To be clear, which approach are we talking about? I think there are
three options:
1. The user tells us not to bother computing real ahead/behind values.
We always say "same" or "not the same".
2. The user tells us not to bother computing ahead/behind values
with more effort than N. After traversing N commits without getting
an answer, we say "same" or "not the same". But we may sometimes
give a real answer if we found it within N.
3. The user tells us not to spend more effort than N. After traversing
N commits we try to make some partial statement based on
generations (or commit timestamps as a proxy for them).
I agree that (3) is probably not going to be useful enough in the
general case to merit the implementation effort and confusion. But is
there anything wrong with (2)?
-Peff
