git-rev-list: add "--dense" flag
This is what the recent git-rev-list changes have all been gearing up for.
When we use a path filter to git-rev-list, the new "--dense" flag asks
git-rev-list to compress the history so that it _only_ contains commits
that change files in the path filter. It also rewrites the parent
information so that tools like "gitk" will see the result as a dense
history tree.
For example, on the current kernel archive:
[torvalds@g5 linux]$ git-rev-list HEAD | wc -l
9904
[torvalds@g5 linux]$ git-rev-list HEAD -- kernel | wc -l
5442
[torvalds@g5 linux]$ git-rev-list --dense HEAD -- kernel | wc -l
356
which shows that while we have almost ten thousand commits, we can prune
down the work to slightly more than half by only following the merges
that are interesting. But further, we can then compress the history to
just 356 entries that actually make changes to the kernel subdirectory.
To see this in action, try something like
gitk --dense -- gitk
to see just the history that affects gitk. Or, to show that true
parallel development still remains parallel, do
gitk --dense -- daemon.c
which shows some parallel commits in the current git tree.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>