Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> Then how do you tell what version a file is if it's outside of a
> checkout?

It's trivial for git to answer that - the file will either be pristine,
and then we can just scan for the matching SHA1, or modified, and we can
scan (taking a weee bit more time) which are the "closest matches" in
your history, in what branches and commits.

The actual scripting for this isn't written just yet -- Linus posted a
proof-of-concept shell implementation along the lines of

     git rev-list --no-merges --full-history v0.5..v0.7 --
src/widget/widget.c > rev-list

       best_commit=none
       best=1000000
       while read commit
       do
               git cat-file blob "$commit:src/widget/widget.c" > tmpfile
               lines=$(diff reference-file tmpfile | wc -l)
               if [ "$lines" -lt "$best" ]
               then
                       echo Best so far: $commit $lines
                       best=$lines
               fi
       done < rev-list

and it's fast. One of the good properties of this is that you can ask
for a range of your history (v0.5 to v0.7 in the example) and an exact
path (src/widget/widget.c) but you can also say --all (meaning "in all
branches") and a handwavy "over there", like src. And git will take an
extra second or two on a large repo, but tell you about all the good
candidates across the branches.

Metadata is metadata, and we can fish it out of the SCM easily - and
data is data, and it's silly to pollute it with metadata that is mostly
incidental.

If I find time today I'll post to the git list a cleaned up version of
Linus' shell script as

    git-findclosestmatch <head or range or --all> path/to/scan/ \
                        randomfile.c

cheers,


m
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