Re: log --graph --first-parent weirdness

From: Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi>
Date: Jun 5, 2008, 09:50 UTC
Message-ID: <20080605095033.GC5946@mithlond.arda.local>
In-Reply-To: <7v1w3dxeh9.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote (2008-06-04 11:05 -0700):

Show 16 quoted lines

> Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi> writes:
> 
> > To me it's perfectly fine to turn off --graph when used with
> > --first-parent, but yes, generally users might expect to see a line
> > of M's, *'s and |'s there. At least it would clearly show which
> > commits are merges and which are not.
> 
> I disagree.  If you are doing --first-parent, you do not _care_ what
> is merge and what is not.  Besides, you can easily see that from the
> log message if you cared enough.
> 
> And if the graph actually draws the real ancestry graph (i.e. without
> --first-parent), the lines visually show which is merge and which is
> not, so the "M" gets very distracting.
> 
> I'd really suggest changing the "M" and use "*" everywhere.

Well, I disagree :-) Merges are interesting points in history (they introduce features etc.) and for a "--graph --first-parent" user a certain already known merge is easier to find if there is a stable identifier for them (like "M"). Commit messages are not stable in that sense and it helps if user can just keep an eye on the graph when searching for a certain merge (helps to skip other commits). Once the correct merge is found, one would perhaps do "git log -p <the-SHA1-of-that-merge>^2".

So I like having separate identifiers for merge commits. However, I do realize that in the bigger picture those M's are not at all essential for finding wanted information from project's history. So this question is not something I'd go arguing too seriously.