Ramblings

History Simplification with git2-rs

Writing a Git GUI like Corylus inevitably includes coming up with a decent layout for the commit history and its ancestry relationships. This is easy enough for the full history, as Git gives you a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of commits. Partial histories (e.g. for a single file) are a different story. The graph is still directed and acyclic, but it's by default no longer connected, i.e. you cannot jump from one commit to its parents during layout because parents may be missing (e.g. because the file you're looking at didn't change there). The CLI has a neat little trick up its sleeve where it will rewrite the parent references to reconnect the graph. This article describes how this may be done (and, by extension, how Corylus does it). More...