Re: [PATCH] Bisect: add checks at the beginning of "git bisect run".

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Mar 28, 2007, 05:46 UTC
Message-ID: <7vk5x1ly2g.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <200703280544.47569.chriscool@tuxfamily.org>

Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org> writes:

> For example "git bisect run" could accept the following options:
>
> --not
> mark current revision as bad instead of good and as good instead of bad

Do you mean this is a useful option when the "run-script" reports failure with 0 exit and success with non-zero exit? In other words, exit code has reversed meanings from the usual?

> --strict
> all exit code except 0 and 1 abort the bisect run process

This I can understand...

> --good <rev1>
> --bad <rev2>
> use rev1 as good and rev2 as bad

I am not sure what you mean by these two.

> --check or --test
> run the script once and then do nothing if the result is good

How would you use this? Presumably this makes the command keep running while the commit is bad, until you hit a good commit and then stop.

I wonder why this is useful.

Stopping at a commit that happens to be good, without narrowing the range all the way down is sometimes useful, as you can usually guess which one of the remaining commits are likely to be involved with the problem you are seeing, when the remaining set is sufficiently narrow. But how narrow the remaining set is does not have much to do with your finding a good commit for the first time. If you start from a single bad commit at the tip of 10-year old project, you would probably try 5-year old commit, which may well be good (or maybe it is too old to be relevant) and then this option would make the cycle stop, and you have 5-year worth of history still left to be bisected. I am not sure what the assumed workflow would be after that point.