Re: [RFC] Second parent for reverts

On Wed, 9 May 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Yes, please.

People can do fancy things if they want, but quite frankly, if you start playing games with the "parent" pointer, it starts losing its meaning, and becomes a random "pointer to another related commit".

Then, you might as well say "oh, this commit is related to that other commit", and decide to call the other commit "related" too, and now a random commit just looks like a strange merge.

That's simply not what "parenthood" is about. Parenthood is about nonlinear development, and parents should not be reachable from each other (which such a bogus revert or "related" parent would almost always be: it would be reachable from the *real* parent.

If you want a "related to that commit" field, it should be a separate field in the commit object. But since it doesn't really have any real *semantic* meaning to git itself, it shouldn't be in the header. We could, for example, make it be in the free-form section, and teach our graphical visualization tools to automatically turn it into a hyperlink.

.. which we already do.

		Linus