Re: ancestor and descendant ~ clarification needed

> Hi,
>
> In Documentation/user-manual.txt:
>
>    In the following, we say that commit X is "reachable" from commit Y
>    if commit X is an ancestor of commit Y.  Equivalently, you could say
>    that Y is a descendant of X, or that there is a chain of parents
>    leading from commit Y to commit X.
> [...]
>    However, if the current branch is a descendant of the other--so every
>    commit present in the one is already contained in the other--then Git
>    just performs a "fast-forward"; the head of the current branch is
>    moved forward to point at the head of the merged-in branch, without
>    any new commits being created.
>
> I'm a Git newbie.  According to my understanding, the "descendant" in
> the second paragraph above should be "ancestor".  I attempt to represent
> my understanding using the following diagram (please see it in a
> monospaced font):
>
> ................................................
>
>          o--o--o <-- Branch A
>         /
>  o--o--o <-- master
>
> ................................................
>
> "master" is the current branch, and (as I understand it) it is an
> ancestor of "Branch A", because there is a chain of parents leading from
> "Branch A" to master.  So "Branch A" (i.e., "the other" branch, or the
> "merged-in" branch) is a descendant of master.  I even set up a test
> repository and attempted to test the above diagram with "git merge-base
> --is-ancestor" (and "echo $?"), but it seems to me that the master
> branch is *not* a descendant of "Branch A".
>
> I hope you can understand my words here (English is not my native
> language).  Can anyone point me in the right direction (what am I
> missing)?
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