Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, David Kastrup wrote: >> >> And then it struck me: Emacs has a very efficient browser for linked >> one-line information that can be expanded into complete changesets >> with diffs inside. It is called "Gnus". A newsreader. > > A newsreader is mis-designed for all the same reasons SVN is > misdesigned: it sees the messages (commits) as a _tree_. In the first place, it sees linked messages. They usually correspond to something treeish, but a newsreader that would barf when they don't would be unusable. Newsreaders actually have to deal with stupid things like _loops_ in message referals without going into a tizzy. Those things happen in Usenet. > Anybody who sees development as a tree is totally bogus by > definition. It sees things forking off, but it doesn't see them > merging. That's a fundamnetal and unfixable design bug. It is not inherent in NNTP. It depends on the particular newsreader, and for pretty much all of them, you can turn off threaded display if it disturbs you. > But to visualize a history, it's useless. Not half as useless as existing git-specific tools. They thrash my computer to death on serious sized trees. Putting every branch into a newsgroup of its own, in contrast, together with the usual header search and refinement options, would be _much_ _much_ faster for accessing a particular patch. I'll probably be able to create a Gnus _backend_ for this sort of setup (there are even backends for directory browsing: most files become articles written by their owner that either are plain text, or that contain their file contents as an attachment -- quite more crazy than a git commit tree). But an nntp server would make the idea usable for more than just Emacs users, and it would allow a much more convenient "what happened on the "next" branch in the last few days" overview than existing tools. It lends itself not well to actually serving trees and blobs (even though one could superficially rely on a rigid tree topology there): newsreaders just don't match the natural way of accessing them (Gnus offers that for files, but it plainly is not much use compared to a dedicated directory browser). But for commits and patches, one group per branch? That would be fine. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
