Re: Octopus merge: unique (?) to git, but is it useful?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 3, 2008, 03:56 UTC
Message-ID: <7v3anv5fy3.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0806021845210.3473@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> Junio: see kernel commits a733a5da9 and 52b097fff89, done as lately as 
> February of this year. We shouldn't allow that kind of thing,...

Well, we even allow fast-forwrad to be recorded as a true merge if the user asks these days.

And the thing is, that "a733a5da9" commit has a smoking-gun evidence that a nonsense is asked by the committer.

    commit a733a5da97b238e3e3167d3d0aee8fe1e8d04e97
    Merge: 299cfe3... 299cfe3... 9e52797...
    Author:     Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>
    AuthorDate: Thu Feb 7 03:38:22 2008 -0500
    Commit:     Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>
    CommitDate: Thu Feb 7 03:38:22 2008 -0500

        Merge branches 'release' and 'fluff' into release

        Conflicts:

            drivers/acpi/scan.c
            include/linux/acpi.h

        Signed-off-by: Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>

"Merge branches 'RELEASE' and 'fluff' into RELEASE"? That happens if you are _on_ release branch and say "git merge release fluff".

Having said that, I think what is happening is that the final set of "other parents" is computed inside git-merge out of MERGE_HEAD and that is usually what is recorded in the resulting merge, but if the merge results in a conflict with manual resolution, that information is not given to the final "git commit". The resulting commit records the parents out of HEAD and MERGE_HEAD. I do not think this part has changed from scripted version of git-commit.