On 4/23/2011 11:58, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> Apparently this doesn't stop people working on the Linux kernel. But it
>>> seems really clumsy to me.
>>
>> It seems clumsy because you keep thinking git is recording changes. You
>> keep thinking of "changes" instead of "versions".
>
> That's because "changes" are the logical thing to think about. Take a look
> at a bunch of commit messages, and they all tell you about what just *changed*.

No. The history is the logical thing to think about. Commits are a logical 
thing to think about. Changes are *one* logical thing to think about, but I 
think it's easier to generate changes from history than to generate history 
from changes, especially when changes aren't in any particular order.

In other words, changes don't represent all the history. You're throwing 
away the history of "clone" and "pull" and "push" and "apply". All you're 
recording is the changes to the files in the WD, not changes in the 
repository itself.

> Or perhaps you meant if I wanted GHC-6.6 and GHC-HEAD?

No, I meant if I wanted to compile each tagged version in the repository. I 
want to compile GHC-1.0, GHC-1.1, GHC-1.2, GHC-2.0, ....

I have to basically apply every patch in sequence in the entire repository, 
in some unknown order.

In git, all those files are already there.  If it's packed, you might wind 
up applying a lot of patches, but the patches are optimal in that case, 
rather than an accident of history.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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