Re: [BUG] git-log shows first parent and repeated last for octopus merge

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Oct 18, 2006, 19:02 UTC
Message-ID: <7v3b9l30sk.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0610181551150.14200@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Jakub Narebski wrote:
>
>> When trying to find how many merges and how many octopus merges (merges with
>> more than two parents) are in git.git repository I have encountered the
>> following strange output of git-log:
>> 
>>  1000:jnareb@roke:~/git> git log --parents --full-history --max-count=1 \
>>    211232bae64bcc60bbf5d1b5e5b2344c22ed767e -- a//b
>>  commit 211232bae64bcc60bbf5d1b5e5b2344c22ed767e <last parent repeated>
>>  Merge: d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b...
>>  [...]
>
> This happens because a//b rewrites the history, i.e. the parents are 
> edited. IMHO it makes no sense at all to show the parents in such a case, 
> since they are bogus.

If the command line did not have --full-history, I would agree with you. The caller explicitly told us not to remove side branches that do not end up modifying the paths, and also told us, with --parent, to show parenthood information after removing intermediate commits that do not change the tree shape (with respect to the specified paths).

So it is showing what the user asked -- the user may not have understood what he was asking, but that is a separate problem, I would think.