About git-thought [was: brisbane: initial cut at a mergeline cache]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Andrew Bennetts writes:

 > Why would you be numbering revisions that aren't in your ancestry?  To
 > describe a pending merge?

There's that.  But more often for me, to describe branch divergence.
Obviously, there's a possible merge in the future or I wouldn't
*care*, but it's not pending in the sense of "as soon as I can grab
the lock".

This is why your conversations with git aficionados don't go anywhere
fast, I think.  You never saw a branch that didn't look like a pending
merge.<wink>  But we see branches as a cache of searches through
revision space.  Sometimes we're looking for a way to converge.  But
often we're looking at ... something else.

If now you ask "what?", then you still don't get it.  There are lots
of things, and the way we want to look at them -- and what we want to
*do* with them -- differs from case to case.  We don't want you to say
"Oh, we can do that *for you*, it'll be in the next version" (editor's
emphasis), we want to do it ourselves.  git allows us to do it with
shell scripts (which sucks as a programming language, but I bet you do
"for i in *; do something_simple; done" as often as you fire up a
Python interpreter to do such simple things -- *everybody* knows how
to program shell).

Why should you care?  Well, some of us would like to be able to do in
bzr, too, what is simple in git.  As long as it's not even thinkable,
though, we can't think about it, and we won't be considering bzr as a
viable alternative to git.