I've been looking at tracking file revisions. One proposed solution was
to have a separate revision history for individual files, with a new
kind of 'filecommit' object which parallels the existing 'commit',
referencing a blob instead of a tree. Then trees would reference such
objects instead of referencing blobs directly.
I think that introduces a lot of redundancy though, because 99% of the
time, the revision history of the individual file is entirely
reproducible from the revision history of the tree. It's only when files
are renamed that we fall over -- and I think we can handle renames
fairly well if we just log them in the commit object.
My 'gitfilelog.sh' script is already capable of tracking a given file
back through multiple tree commits, listing those commits where the file
in question was actually changed. It uses my patched version of diff-
tree which supports 'diff-tree <TREE_A> <TREE_B> <filename>' in order to
do this.
By storing rename information in the commit object, the script (or a
reimplementation of a similar algorithm) could know when to change the
filename it's looking for, as it goes back through the tree. That ought
to be perfectly sufficient.
So a commit involving a rename would look something like this...
tree 82ba574c85e9a2e4652419c88244e9dd1bfa8baa
parent bb95843a5a0f397270819462812735ee29796fb4
rename foo.c bar.c
author David Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 1113499881 +0100
committer David Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 1113499881 +0100
Rename foo.c to bar.c and s/foo_/bar_/g
Opinions? Dissent? We'd probably need to escape the filenames in some
way -- handwave over that for now.
--
dwmw2
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
