Proposal for a crazy new Group type

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Hi,

I have been thinking about how Emacs could help with navigating branch
histories of git (a version control system), and the problem is that
one needs to have delayed action and so on if one wants to hope to
keep abreast of large repositories.

Enter Gnus.

git assigns a unique SHA1 hash to every commit (-> article Id).  Every
commit can have one or more (in the case of a merge) parents (->
References).  Commits can be formatted as mail messages with
"git-format-patch", including inline or external text/x-patch parts
and subject, sender and so on.  One does not actually need to call
git-format-patch to guess the subject line, however: that's the
one-line log info, so it is easy to generate a chronological list of
headers without actually looking into the patches.

If one wants to submit patches, one can easily respool them to an imap
send folder or the draft folder.  It might even make sense to respool
a patch series to a group corresponding to a different branch, but at
the moment having read-only access to a git repository as an ephemeral
group (and probably as a whole, not limited to a branch) providing a
view into the patches would be great.

Anyway: basically all the functionality that is required for a News
source, threading, message ids, header prefetch, article on request:
it is all available.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum