On 08/16/2012 10:51 AM, Thomas Rast wrote:
[...]
is misleading. I suppose the real problem is that the "true" ordering
is completely obvious as the one ordering that does not require
preprocessing, but ugly to specify in words. Perhaps we can bikeshed a
little? How about
By default, commits are shown in an order that coincides with
`--date-order` on well-behaved history, but is faster to compute.
Maybe the problem is not the description of the options, but the options
themselves. Why does the behavior default to some mysterious order that
we don't even want to document? Only for the sake of computational
efficiency. This is the tail wagging the dog.
Why not turn the behavior on its head:
* Change the default behavior to be something well-defined, easy to
document, and convenient for humans, such as "topological order with
ties broken by timestamp" or "approximate timestamp order, but
respecting dependencies".
* Add a new option, --arbitrary-order, that explicitly chooses
efficiency instead of a defined order.
That way the easiest thing to type is also the most convenient, whereas
when you care about efficiency and *don't* care about order (i.e.,
mainly in scripts) you can explicitly request the high-performance option.
Michael
--
Michael Haggerty
mhag...@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/
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