Re: [PATCH/RFC] fmt-merge-msg: add a blank line after people info

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 16, 2012, 17:28 UTC
Message-ID: <7vpqa4c9wr.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CA+55aFyX66RpUA2Xh8drGErHB7Wuni20cUAMGawLsqG6MTTohA@mail.gmail.com>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> Now, computing this efficiently may not be trivial, as you would need N^2
>> reachability analysis when pulling in N commits. Among 2000 recent merges
>> I sampled from the kernel history, 70+ pull in more than 1000 commits (the
>> largest one d4bbf7e77 pulls in 21k commits).
>
> So I have to say, for my purposes, it not only might be inefficient,
> but it can still be very misleading.
> ...
> (Admittedly, so it the shortlog we put in the merge, so that "you can
> find it later in the git tree itself" not *that* great of an argument
> - the real argument for me is that it doesn't matter what you count,
> you'll not necessarily get the actual piece of information I care
> about..).

There is no way to mine "X pulled from Y" out of the topology if you allow fast-forward anywhere, so "I care about whom I pulled from" is something people need to give out of band. Your lieutenant may have fast-forwarded his history from his lieutenant's, or you may even be fast-forwarding your history from your lieutenant's, in which case you do not even have a merge commit to record that fact anyway. If you do not fast-forward, at least the merge subject would give you where you got the history from, so it is not like that the information *must* be obtained by looking at the history anyway (incidentally, that was the reason why the "better than random number generator but not by a large margin" version gives an extra weight to the tip commit you are pulling; unless your lieutenant fast-forwarded, that is the person you pulled from).

> So I'm not entirely convinced yet. I don't *dislike* the concept, but
> I could definitely do without it (or maybe have it in the commented
> part of the commit message, so that you'd have to explicitly edit it
> to show up).

I am tempted to suggest removing the "via" part as a failed experiment for now.