reducing line crossings in gitk

At the moment, the commit graph that gitk draws always displays the parents of a merge in left-to-right order as they are listed in the commit (provided that none of the parents already has a line, i.e., is the parent of an previously drawn commit). That means that for the typical merge, the branch coming out to the right is the stuff that was pulled in by the merge.

That can lead to a later line crossing if an ancestor of the stuff being pulled in already has a line that is to the left of the merge. For an example of what I mean, look at the kernel repository with gitk at around commit 5ea6f2c33f0c8b126136dbf1776ffbc444772cd7 (Automatic merge of /spare/repo/netdev-2.6 branch natsemi).

I could add a heuristic to look for this case and reverse the order of the parents, which would reduce the line crossings and make the graph look neater. Would this be worth the slight loss of information (in that the stuff pulled in would no longer always be to the right)?

Paul.