Re: [PATCH] Document git rev-list --first-parent

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 24, 2007, 09:58 UTC
Message-ID: <7vejdcs9cb.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <476F7EA4.1030001@qumranet.com>

Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com> writes:
>>
>>
>>> Junio C Hamano wrote:
>>>
>>>> Avi Kivity <avi@qumranet.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Document git rev-list's --first-parent option.  Documentation taken from
>>>>> git log.
>> ...
> [I assume you mean 0053e902;  I just copied the output of git log --help]

Ahh, sorry, I thought you did "log -S--first-parent".

> Well, my use case is different.  All of the development merges are
> fast-forwards (or plain patch applications); the only multiple-parent
> merges are pulls I do from the main tree in order to advance the
> baseline,...

Yeah, that is what I meant as a special case. If you submit patches and rebase the remainder of your changes to the updated upstream (as x.org folks seem to do), then the --first-parent history will not be your own development but "the global trunk history." If you are the top-level maintainer and your pull sometimes ends up as a fast forward and sometimes a real merge, you will sometimes get a full history of a topic done by somebody else (if that person rebased on top of you) or just a summary single merge (otherwise), and the distinction between these two cases does not have anything to do with whose commits they are (i.e. mine vs others) or the scope of the changes (i.e. the trunk history vs side branch development). It would not be as useful as the "looking at the list of one's own commits while summarizing out others' developments as merge commits" world view the --first-parent would give you in your history.