Actually, I know what he wants, since I tried to describe it for the
filter-branch discussion. It's really not that conceptually complex.
Basically, the stupid model is to just do this:
- start with --full-history
- for each merge, look at both parents. If one parent leads directly to
a commit that can be reached from the the other, just remove that
parent as being redundant. And if that removal leads to a merge now
becoming a non-merge, and it has no changes wrt its single remaining
parent, remove the commit entirely (rewriting any parenthood to make
the rest all stay together, of course)
- repeat until you cannot do any more simplification (removing one commit
can actually cause its children to now become targets for this
simplification).
and I suspect that
(a) the stupid model is probably at least O(n^3) if done stupidly and
O(n^2) with some modest amount of smarts (keeping a list of at least
potential targets of simplification and expanding it only when
actually simplifying), but that
(b) you can concentrate on just the merges that the current optimizing
algorithm would have removed, so 'n' is not the total number of
commits, but at most the number of merges, and more likely actually
just the number of trivial merges in that file, and finally
(c) there is likely some smart and efficient graph minimization algorithm
that is O(nlogn) or something.
so I don't think it's likely to be hugely more expensive than the
topo-sort is. All the real expense is in the same thing the topo-sort
expense, namely in generating the list up-front.
I bet googling for "minimal directed acyclic graph" will give pointers.
And despite the fact that I've argued against Roman's world-view, I
actually _do_ think it would be nice to have that third mode, the same way
that we have --topo-order. It wouldn't be good for the _default_ view, but
then neither is --full-history, so that's not a big argument.
That said, I'd like to (again) repeat the caveat that it's probably best
done in the tool that actally visualizes the mess - exactly for the same
reason that I argued for the topological sort being done in gitk. It's
very painful to have to wait for the first few commits to start appearing
in the history window.
Admittedly most of my work is actually done on machines that are pretty
fast, but every once in a while I travel with a laptop. And more
importantly, not everybody gets new hardware from Intel for testing even
before the CPU has been released. So others will still appreciate
incremental history updates, even if my machine might be fast enough (and
my kernel tree always in the caches) that I myself could live with a
synchronous version a-la --topo-order.
Linus
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