On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Yes. I'm not opposed to yours, I was just opposed to some of the things
> around it you did, so I wrote mine as a kind of place-holder. I'll happily
> take patches to turn it from a rally simple and stupid one into a more
> polished version.
Btw, before I forget - I did have another reason. I actually think that
the date is potentially a lot more important than "how many parents deep".
In particular, it's entirely possible that the top of my head might be a
veru recent merge that merges with a small fix relative to a very old
parent (making that old parent be just two hops away from the head), while
the thing I want to merge might also have that old parent (for similar
reasons) as a relatively "close" parent from a pure link-counting
standpoint.
The reason I bring this up is that quite often people end up basing their
work on a specific release version, so a merge (especially in specialized
areas) may thus bring such an old parent pretty close to the head, and it
can actually be quite possible (indeed probable) that such a parent ends
up being a common parent.
However, it can easily be a very _bad_ parent.
In ascii barfic:
----------------------- patch ---------
/ \
/ \
- old release -- ... lots of development .. -----HEAD
\ \
\ \
\ ---------------------patch-- MERGE-HEAD
\ /
.. lots of development .. /
it looks like "old release" is pretty close to both HEAD and MERGE-HEAD,
right?
But that's just an artifact of the fact that they both had a trivial merge
against some older code, and if the two "lots of development" things have
ever done an earlier merge, there's quite possibly a _much_ better common
parent there somewhere.
I dunno.
Linus
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