Re: Tracking branch history

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: May 14, 2006, 23:16 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfyjc19jt.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20060513T140528-554@post.gmane.org>

Elrond <elrond+kernel.org@samba-tng.org> writes:

Show 25 quoted lines

> Daniel Barkalow <barkalow <at> iabervon.org> writes:
>
>> 
>> One feature that might make git more intuitive to people is if we were to 
>> additionally track the history of what commit was the head of each branch 
>> over time. This is only vaguely related to the history of the content, but 
>> it's well-defined and sometimes significant.
>> 
>> E.g., if you know that two weeks ago, what you had worked, but it doesn't 
>> work now, you can use git-bisect to figure out what happened, but first 
>> you have to figure out what commit it was that you were using two weeks 
>> ago. Two weeks ago, we had that information, but we didn't keep it.
>
> On a related issue:
>
> Looking at a commit:
>    commit id-commit
>    parent id-1
>    parent id-2
>    parent id-3
>
>        Merge branch 'branch-2', 'branch-3'
>
> One can tell the name of the branches for id-2 and id-3 (branch-2, 3),
> but one can't tell the name of id-1.

That's deliberate. If you are merging into a branch other than "master", the message would say:

        commit ea892b27b15fbc46a3bb3ad2ddce737dc6590ae5
        Merge: 7278a29... 8d48ad6...
        Author: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
        Date:   Sat May 13 18:49:54 2006 -0700

            Merge branch 'lt/config' into next

            * lt/config:
              git config syntax updates
              Another config file parsing fix.
              checkout: use --aggressive when running a 3-way merge (-m).
              Fix git-pack-objects for 64-bit platforms
              fix diff-delta bad memory access

The point is to keep the punch line as short and meaningful for the most common case.