Hello. At the risk of raising the debate about which version control
system we should
use, I have a question about git, as well as a comment about it relative to the
NetBSD source
tree. I should preface my comments with the caveat that I am not by any means
a git expert,
and, in fact, I'm barely able to get anything I want out of it. With that
said, here are my
questions and observations. I'd be interested to know how others work around
these issues
and/or what you think of my observations.
1. In CVS, I can do something like:
cvs log sys/dev/pci/if_bge.c
and be given a complete history of the changes to that file, as well as a list
of all the
branches that file participates in and which versions apply to each branch.
And, I can do this
without having to download all of the history of that file onto my local
storage.
It seems like the only way to do this with a git repository is to
download the entire
source tree, along with its history and branches, using git clone with an
infinite depth. Is
this correct? If not, how can I see all the branches of a given repository
without having to
download the entire repository?
2. Also, in my exploration of git, it seems like the git log command shows all
the commits for
each tag, rather than the comments for a specific file or object in the
repository. Again, is
this correct?
If I am correct in my guesses about how git works, it seems like I
would have to download
the entire history of the NetBSD source tree if I want to browse its branches,
or the commit
history for any given file. This is a lot of overhead to examine tiny portions
of the tree,
relatively speaking, assuming we move to git for our version control system.
It strikes me
that requiring this much storage space from developers, would be a regression
from what we
currently do. Since I think we're smarter than that and since we have very
smart people on our
development team, I want to understand what it is that I don't get about git
that precludes me
from having to download the entire history of the source tree from day one
while still
retaining access to that history over time.
-thanks
-Brian
