Re: Re: Re: Add clone support to lntree

2005-04-16 Thread Petr Baudis
Dear diary, on Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 05:16:12AM CEST, I got a letter
where Linus Torvalds [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that...
 On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:
  
  I'm wondering, whether each tree should be fixed to a certain branch.
 
 I'm wondering why you talk about branches at all.
 
 No such thing should exist. There are no branches. There are just 
 repositories. You can track somebody elses repository, but you should 
 track it by location, not by any branch name.
 
 And you track it by just merging it.
 
 Yeah, we don't have really usable merges yet, but..

First, this level of branches concerns multiple working directories
tied to a single repository. It seems like a sensible thing to do; and
you agreed with it too (IIRC). And when you do that, git-pasky just
saves some work for you. For git-pasky, branch is really just a symbolic
name for a commit ID, which gets updated every time you commit in some
repository. Nothing more.

So the whole point of this is to have a symbolic name for some other
working directory. When you want to merge, you don't need to go over to
the other directory, do commit-id, cut'n'paste, and feed that to git
merge. You just do

git merge myotherbranch


Now, about remote repositories. When you pull a remote repository, that
does not mean it has to be immediately merged somewhere. It is very
useful to have another branch you do *not* want to merge, but you want
to do diffs to it, or even check it out / export it later to some
separate directory. Again, the branch is just a symbolic name for the
head commit ID of what you pulled, and the pointer gets updated every
time you pull again - that's the whole point of it.

The last concept are tracking working directories. If you pull the
tracked branch to this directory, it also automerges it. This is useful
when you have a single canonical branch for this directory, which it
should always mirror. That would be the case e.g. for the gazillions of
Linux users who would like to just have the latest bleeding kernel of
your, and they expect to use git just like a different CVS. Basically,
they will just do

git pull

instead of

cvs update

:-).

-- 
Petr Pasky Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. -- Steve Taylor
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Re: Re: Add clone support to lntree

2005-04-16 Thread Daniel Barkalow
On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:

 Dear diary, on Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 05:06:54AM CEST, I got a letter
 where Daniel Barkalow [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that...

  I think fork is as good as anything for describing the operation. I had
  thought about clone because it seemed to fill the role that bk
  clone had (although I never used BK, so I'm not sure). It doesn't seem
  useful to me to try cloning multiple remote repositories, since you'd get
  a copy of anything common from each; you just want to suck everything into
  the same .git/objects and split off working directories.
 
 Actually, what about if git pull outside of repository did what git
 clone does now? I'd kinda like clone instead of fork too.

This seems like the best solution to me, too. Although that would make
pull take a URL when making a new repository and not otherwise, which
might be confusing. init-remote perhaps, or maybe just have init do it
if given a URL?

-Daniel
*This .sig left intentionally blank*

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Re: Re: Re: Add clone support to lntree

2005-04-16 Thread Petr Baudis
Dear diary, on Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 05:17:00AM CEST, I got a letter
where Daniel Barkalow [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that...
 On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:
 
  Dear diary, on Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 04:47:55AM CEST, I got a letter
  where Petr Baudis [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that...
 git branch --- creates a branch from a given commit
 (when passed empty commit, creates a branch
 from the current commit and sets the working
 tree to that branch)
   Note that there is a bug in current git update - it will allow you to
   bring several of your trees to follow the same branch, or even a remote
   branch. This is not even supposed to work, and will be fixed when I get
   some sleep. You will be able to do git pull even on local branches, and
   the proper solution for this will be just tracking the branch you want
   to follow.
  
  I must admit that I'm not entirely decided yet, so I'd love to hear your
  opinion.
  
  I'm wondering, whether each tree should be fixed to a certain branch.
  That is, you decide a name when you do git fork, and then the tree
  always follows that branch. (It always has to follow [be bound to]
  *some* branch, and each branch can be followed by only a single tree at
  a time.)
 
 I don't think I'm following the use of branches. Currently, what I do is
 have a git-pasky and a git-linus, and fork off a working directory from
 one of these for each thing I want to work on. I do some work, commit as I
 make progress, and then do a diff against the remote head to get a patch
 to send off. If I want to do a series of patches which depend on each
 other, I fork my next directory off of my previous one rather than off of
 a remote base. I haven't done much rebasing, so I haven't worked out how I
 would do that most effectively.

Yes. And that's exactly what the branches allow you to do. You just do

git fork myhttpclient ~/myhttpclientdir

then you do some hacking, and when you have something usable, you can
go back to your main working directory and do

git merge -b when_you_started myhttpclient

Since you consider the code perfect, you can now just rm -rf
~/myhttpclient.

Suddenly, you get a mail from mj pointing out some bugs, and it looks
like there are more to come. What to do?

git fork myhttpclient ~/myhttpclientdir

(Ok, this does not work, but that's a bug, will fix tomorrow.) This will
let you take off when you left in your work on the branch.

git update for seeking between commits is probably extremely important
for any kind of binary search when you are wondering when did this bug
appeared first, or when you are exploring how certain branch evolved
over time. Doing git fork for each successive iteration sounds horrible.


Now, what about git branch and git update for switching between
branches? I think this is the most controversial part; these are
basically just shortcuts for not having to do git fork, and I wouldn't
mind so much removing them, if you people really consider them too ugly
a wart for the soft clean git skin. I admit that they both come from a
hidden prejudice that git fork is going to be slow and eat a lot of
disk.

The idea for git branch is to mark a commit as this is a branch but I
don't want to git fork (because I'm lazy or short on disk space or
whatever). Let's say you are tracking a branch, do some local commits
and then want to untrack. This will get you back to HEAD.local, but you
want to keep a reference for your local commits, and possibly work on
them more later - so you mark them as a branch. But thinking about it, I
couldn't come up with another usage case than this, and I think that now
that we have git fork, I will modify git track behaviour heavily so that
tracking/untracking won't really switch you to the other branch
completely, but really only tell git pull that you want the pulled
updates applied. So git branch command will likely go.

The idea for git update for switching between branches is that
especially when you have two rather similar branches and mostly do stuff
on one of them, but sometimes you want to do something on the other one,
you can do just quick git update, do stuff, and git update back, without
any forking.


Note that this all is *absolutely* subject to change, provided you can
convince me about some better way. ;-) My mindset on this is pretty
open. This is just what seems to me as a pretty flexible and elegant to
do stuff, while giving you enough freedom to pick your own style.

 I think I can make this space efficient by hardlinking unmodified blobs to
 a directory of cached expanded blobs.

I don't know but I really feel *very* unsafe when doing that. What if
something screws up and corrupts my base... way too easy. And it gets
pretty inconvenient and even more dangerous when you get the idea to do
some modifications on your tree by something else than your favorite
editor (which you've already checked does the right 

Re: Re: Re: Add clone support to lntree

2005-04-16 Thread Petr Baudis
Dear diary, on Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 01:07:35AM CEST, I got a letter
where Daniel Barkalow [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that...
  Actually, what about if git pull outside of repository did what git
  clone does now? I'd kinda like clone instead of fork too.
 
 This seems like the best solution to me, too. Although that would make
 pull take a URL when making a new repository and not otherwise, which
 might be confusing. init-remote perhaps, or maybe just have init do it
 if given a URL?

Yes, init taking URL optionally sounds ideal. Thanks.

-- 
Petr Pasky Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. -- Steve Taylor
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Re: Re: Re: Add clone support to lntree

2005-04-16 Thread Daniel Barkalow
On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:

 Dear diary, on Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 05:17:00AM CEST, I got a letter
 where Daniel Barkalow [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that...
  On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:
  
   Dear diary, on Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 04:47:55AM CEST, I got a letter
   where Petr Baudis [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that...
git branch --- creates a branch from a given commit
(when passed empty commit, creates a branch
from the current commit and sets the working
tree to that branch)
Note that there is a bug in current git update - it will allow you to
bring several of your trees to follow the same branch, or even a remote
branch. This is not even supposed to work, and will be fixed when I get
some sleep. You will be able to do git pull even on local branches, and
the proper solution for this will be just tracking the branch you want
to follow.
   
   I must admit that I'm not entirely decided yet, so I'd love to hear your
   opinion.
   
   I'm wondering, whether each tree should be fixed to a certain branch.
   That is, you decide a name when you do git fork, and then the tree
   always follows that branch. (It always has to follow [be bound to]
   *some* branch, and each branch can be followed by only a single tree at
   a time.)
  
  I don't think I'm following the use of branches. Currently, what I do is
  have a git-pasky and a git-linus, and fork off a working directory from
  one of these for each thing I want to work on. I do some work, commit as I
  make progress, and then do a diff against the remote head to get a patch
  to send off. If I want to do a series of patches which depend on each
  other, I fork my next directory off of my previous one rather than off of
  a remote base. I haven't done much rebasing, so I haven't worked out how I
  would do that most effectively.
 
 Yes. And that's exactly what the branches allow you to do. You just do
 
   git fork myhttpclient ~/myhttpclientdir
 
 then you do some hacking, and when you have something usable, you can
 go back to your main working directory and do
 
   git merge -b when_you_started myhttpclient
 
 Since you consider the code perfect, you can now just rm -rf
 ~/myhttpclient.
 
 Suddenly, you get a mail from mj pointing out some bugs, and it looks
 like there are more to come. What to do?
 
   git fork myhttpclient ~/myhttpclientdir
 
 (Ok, this does not work, but that's a bug, will fix tomorrow.) This will
 let you take off when you left in your work on the branch.

Ah, I think that's what made me think I wasn't understanding branches; the
first thing I tried hit this big.

 git update for seeking between commits is probably extremely important
 for any kind of binary search when you are wondering when did this bug
 appeared first, or when you are exploring how certain branch evolved
 over time. Doing git fork for each successive iteration sounds horrible.

Even if there isn't a performance hit, it's semantically wrong, because
you're looking at different versions that were in the same place at
different times.

 Now, what about git branch and git update for switching between
 branches? I think this is the most controversial part; these are
 basically just shortcuts for not having to do git fork, and I wouldn't
 mind so much removing them, if you people really consider them too ugly
 a wart for the soft clean git skin. I admit that they both come from a
 hidden prejudice that git fork is going to be slow and eat a lot of
 disk.

I think that this just confuses matters.

 The idea for git update for switching between branches is that
 especially when you have two rather similar branches and mostly do stuff
 on one of them, but sometimes you want to do something on the other one,
 you can do just quick git update, do stuff, and git update back, without
 any forking.

I still think that fork should be quick enough, or you could leave the
extra tree around. I'm not against having such a command, but I think it
should be a separate command rather than a different use of update, since
it would be used by poeople working in different ways.

  I think I can make this space efficient by hardlinking unmodified blobs to
  a directory of cached expanded blobs.
 
 I don't know but I really feel *very* unsafe when doing that. What if
 something screws up and corrupts my base... way too easy. And it gets
 pretty inconvenient and even more dangerous when you get the idea to do
 some modifications on your tree by something else than your favorite
 editor (which you've already checked does the right thing).

It should only be an option, not required and maybe not even
default. I think it should be possible to prevent stuff from screwing up,
since we really don't want anything to ever modify those inodes (as
opposed to some cases, where you want to modify inodes only in certain
ways). For that matter, relatively 

Re: Re: Add clone support to lntree

2005-04-15 Thread Linus Torvalds


On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:
 
 I'm wondering, whether each tree should be fixed to a certain branch.

I'm wondering why you talk about branches at all.

No such thing should exist. There are no branches. There are just 
repositories. You can track somebody elses repository, but you should 
track it by location, not by any branch name.

And you track it by just merging it.

Yeah, we don't have really usable merges yet, but..

Linus
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