Re: [PATCH 1/2] revision: Denote root commits with '#'
- From
- Kyle Marek <kmarek@pdinc.us>
- Date
- Jan 19, 2021, 07:43 UTC
- Message-ID
- <237aeef3-239f-bff4-fa17-5581092c8f51@pdinc.us>
- In-Reply-To
- <xmqqr1mij88k.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
On 1/18/21 3:33 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
Show 69 quoted lines
> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>
>> [Footnote]
>>
>> *1* Stepping back a bit, I think concentrating too much on "is it
>> root?" is a wrong way to think about the problem. Suppose you
>> have two histories, e.g. (time flows from left to right; A and X
>> are roots)
> A shorter and more concrete example. Start from an empty repository:
>
> $ git init
> $ git commit --allow-empty -m Aroot
> $ git checkout --orphan side
> $ git commit --allow-empty -m Xroot
> $ git log --all --graph --oneline
> * a1f7cb2 (HEAD -> side) Xroot
> * b6fb655 (master) Aroot
>
> These depict two root commits, Aroot and Xroot, and no other
> commits. We do want to show that these two commits do not have
> parent-child relationship at all, and your (and a few proposals made
> by other in the past) solution was to show them both with "#".
>
> Continuing in the same repository:
>
> $ git checkout --orphan another
> $ git commit --allow-empty -m Oroot
> $ git commit --allow-empty -m A
> $ git log --graph --oneline ^another^ another side
> * eddf116 (HEAD -> another) A
> * a1f7cb2 (side) Xroot
>
> These depict two commits, A and Xroot, and no other commits. We
> also want to show that these two commits do not have parent-child
> relationship at all, but if we paint Xroot with "#", it still makes
> it appear that A is a child of Xroot.
>
>> And the right way to look at it is "does A have any parent in
>> the part of the history being shown?", not "does A have any
>> parent?" Then 'A' will get exactly the same treatment in the
>> two examples, and the visual problem that makes A appear as if
>> it has parent-child relationship with unrelated commit X goes
>> away.
> So the condition we saw in your patches, !commit->parents, which
> attempted to see if it was root, needs to be replaced with a helper
> function that checks if there is any parent that is shown in the
> output. Perhaps
>
> int no_interesting_parents(struct commit *commit)
> {
> struct commit_list *parents = commit->parents;
>
> while (parents) {
> if (!(parents->object.flags & UNINTERESTING))
> return 0;
> parents = parents->next;
> }
> return 1;
> }
>
> or something like that should serve as a replacement, i.e.
>
> return !commit->parents ? "#" : "*";
>
> would become
>
> return no_interesting_parents(commit) ? "#" : "*";
>
> Hmm?Okay, I see what you mean. Fixing --graph to avoid implying ancestry sounds like a better approach to me.
That being said, I spoke to Jason recently, and he expressed interest in optionally marking root commits so they are easy to search for in a graph with something like /# in `less`. I see value in this, too.
So would you be open to my modifying of the patch in question (patch 1+2 squashed, I guess) to instead use "--mark-roots=<mark>" to optionally mark root commits with a string <mark>, and pursue fixing the --graph rendering issue in another series?
If so, what would you like to see out of the --left-right issue? Maybe "--mark-left-root=<mark>" and "--mark-right-root=<mark>", so multi-byte strings may be used? Can there be more than one root on either side? (so the option would use a plural "roots" instead of "root"?)
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