Re: cgit, ages and chronological order

On 2021-Nov-9, at 22:03, Graham Perrin <grahamperrin@gmail.com> wrote:

> <https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/?qt=grep&q=terminfo&h=main>, for example, is it normal for results to _not_ be in chronological order?
> 
> (Has it always been so, have I never noticed?)
> 

If I gather correctly, a distinction is being made here between searches
that result in tracking parent-commit order, with parents shown (possibly
only the "first-parents" path), vs. searches that need not display various
parent-commits (even omitting some first-parent ones).

Ones that follow parent-commit order (those involving one of):

?qt=grep?q=
?qt=author?q=
?qt=commiter?q=
?qt=range?q=
?qt=range?q=SOMETEXT (that is a correct range specification)

(Those empty ?q= lead to being like https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/ lists.)

Ones that do not follow parent-commit order (because of
what is omitted): Those with,

?qt=grep?q=SOMETEXT
?qt=author?q=SOMETEXT
?qt=commiter?q=SOMETEXT

For those last 3, I gather you would like the display order to be by the
Age order.

I've not figured out what the crtieria is for the order currently displayed
for these, with your specific example of
https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/?qt=grep&q=terminfo&h=main being
a good example: The first line after the column title line being:

* 	Remove parameter names from libzfs.h signatures	Nick Black	2020-01-09	1	-7/+7

is far from obvious to me.

(One thing I do not know is how reasonable it would be to sort search
results that have a huge number of lines to make the end results be in
Age order.)

Notes:

I may not have listed all forms of ?qt=????q=???? that match everything
or a single subsequence of a parent-commit order vs. those that do not
match such and so omit some partent-commits. Still, I hope the general
point is clear.

For this note, I'm ignoring the "time mismatch" issue. It appears that
consideration of trying to avoid sizable mismatches is being made.
(This would not fix already existing sizable mismatches, just prevent
more.)


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)