[Gnu-arch-users] Re: fixing and extending "selected commit"

[Miles Bader]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:
> Copying a tree is just about the second or third lightest weight
> operation you can do to a whole tree (I'm putting a `find' traversal
> and a `make a link tree' ahead of it, a simple `grep'-like traversal
> just behind those).

Those things are also too expensive....

I do a lot of work on linux trees in NFS, for instance, where every
filesystem cost is magified, _especially_ anything that opens a file.

> So, you know, if your development environment is _so_ out of scale
> with your tree that copying the tree is just too horrible to
> complicate:  then perhaps either your environment is far weaker than
> you need, or your tree is out of control.c

Well what do you want me to say?  Clearly trees like linux (or emacs)
are accepted by the general developer community as being `small enough'
for general use; if arch can't handle them, people will think `arch
sucks' rather than `my development style sucks.'  Me too, BTW; sometimes
there are pretty inescapable reasons to do things like tree-copying, but
well, not in this case.

Having a _way_ to do what's basically a `copy-as-if-committed-
respecting-limits' might be great for doing pre-commit testing or
whatever, maybe I'll even use it sometimes, but I think it's not
appropriate to make it the only way to do partial commits.

-Miles
-- 
"1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns"