History horizons: how hard can they be ?

[Andrew Cowie]

On Sun, 2009-11-15 at 18:54 +0100, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> Another option is supporting history horizons - just letting everything
> except for the last X revisions on the mainline be a ghost. This would
> work well at least for...

This strikes me as being surprisingly sensible.

We've had quite a number of conversations about the fact that in the
general open source hacking case, one does *not* need full history, but
really only just needs "the last 100 revisions or so".

This is because the general case is that one just wants to grab the
current tip of 'mainline' or a release branch, "do a little patch"
fixing whatever, and then [hopefully!] submit it. And for all that DVCS
is amazingly cool, you don't need to know about the state of the code
from 11 years ago to do a little patch to the current tip.

Indeed, from my layman's perspective, the only reason I can see that
you'd need ~100 and not ~1 revision [ie, a full current tree state] is
to give you a better chance when it comes time to merge from upstream /
be merged back into upstream. And if stacking 'n all is smart enough to
go get more revisions if you need more [sorry, don't know anything about
that feature] then really this all seems doable.

None of any of what I just wrote is news, but what Jelmer says makes
huge sense to me for this common case - and would seem to help the
"distro made of branches" effort that is apparently important to someone
hereabouts.

If you go down this road, however, the one thing I would *REALLY*
encourage is to make the UI like bzr-gtk's visualize have really clear
"click here to download more history" -ish buttons so that it can pull
in revisions on demand, rather than showing no history. Giving credit to
past authors is so very important.

AfC
Sydney

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie

Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy
focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems
review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling
successful deployment of mission critical information technology in
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http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
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