Re: git-bisect problem

Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> writes:

A single commit is either:

	git format-patch -o ~/a 386093^ 386093
	git show 386093

But if you _did_ want to get everything that builds on top of 386093 (and Linus counted 1000+ commits if I recall), format-patch could be optimized. It currently does a lot more than just format 1000+ commits, to handle case where "his" and "mine" are not linear history and may have the same change acquired by applying the same patch:

          1---2---3 mine
         /
     ---4---5---6 his

In this picture, it does not just format 1 2 3. It first checks 1 2 3 5 6, and if each of 1 2 3 introduces the same change as either 5 or 6 introduces to omit it from the output. If 2 and 5 are the same change from 1 and 4 respectively, the final result has 1 and 3. This is OK and useful for smaller branch, but clearly expensive for long branches.

This is omitted when the ancestry graph would look like this:
	
          1---2---3 mine
         /
     ---4 his

but that would not have helped in this case anyway.

Maybe we could have --no-omit-common flag or something to disable this check.