Re: [PATCH] Additional merge-base tests

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

We could have had "commit generation number" in the commit object header, and use that instead of commit timestamps for these traversal purposes. The generation number for a commit is defined to be max(generation number of its parents)+1 and we prime the recursive this definition by defining the generation number for the root commit to be one. A moral equivalent alternative would be to notice that the commit timestamp we are going to use to create for a new commit is smaller than one of the commit timestamps of its parent commits and adjust the commit timestamp in such a case by git-commit-tree, perhaps with a warning.

These are pretty much water under the bridge by now, for two reasons. One is that I think it is better to make the tools that use get_merge_bases() prepared for the case the function includes suboptimal bases anyway, and the other is once we do that this is not a strong enough justification to modify the commit object format.