Re: [PATCH v9 0/4] graph: indent visual roots in graph

From: Pablo Sabater <pabloosabaterr@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 11, 2026, 15:41 UTC
Message-ID: <DJVUU76PUXR4.2BYRTA8SEEBVC@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alJOgYmAfGg37hsB@exploit>

On Sat Jul 11, 2026 at 4:15 PM CEST, Mirko Faina wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 03:37:49PM +0200, Pablo Sabater wrote:
>> When rendering a graph, if the history contains multiple "visual roots",
>> actual roots or commits that look like roots (i.e. have their parents
>> filtered out) can end up being vertically adjacent to unrelated commits,
>> falsely appearing to be related.
>>
>> A fix for this issue was already attempted [1] a while ago.
>>
>> This series adds indentation to the visual root commits, so they cannot be
>> vertically adjacent anymore making it easier to identify them.

 [snip]

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>
> Sorry, I know I'm a bit late to the discussion regarding the design,
> but, could we maybe have two different code paths for printing graphs?
> Having the old one as a default and this new one only when we're using
> --oneline (well, --format=reference would benefit too)? As it is now if
> I have multiple one-patch series in sequence the entries are
> unnecessarily indented.
>
> Thanks

No worries :)

Well, I thought that it could become annoying given the scenario of having too many visual roots one after the other. But I didn't have a clear way of having that scenario without forcing it.

I think that this solves an ambiguity so it should be the default option and someone who doesn't want the indentation has to explicitly unset it maybe with something like '--no-graph-indent'.

Apart from having an option to disable indentation.

We could have the cascading to have a limit or make it zig-zag:

instead of:

A
  B
    C
      D

We could do:

A
  B
C
  D

This would have its own edge cases like:

A
  B
C <- if we zig-zag here C and D become ambiguous, currently we are
D    indenting only the last commits (visual roots) here we would have
D    to chose between continuing cascading or indenting the first of D.

I'm not so sure if I like the zig-zag solution because we need to think again if it causes an ambiguity, but I wanted to mention it.

I think we need some more opinions about the design.

Thanks, Pablo