Re: Bisecting through the middle of a big merge?

From: walt <w41ter@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 28, 2012, 18:15 UTC
Message-ID: <jg1e0t$5cs$1@dough.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <m239b0fbpb.fsf@igel.home>

On 01/28/2012 12:55 AM, Andreas Schwab wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> walt <w41ter@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> There are many individual commits from Tejun Heo et al included
>> in that one big commit from Linus.  Unfortunately for me, some of
>> those commits cause other problems that I'm not trying to bisect;
>> other problems that evidently get fixed by other commits in the
>> same big merge.
>>
>> So I do 'git bisect skip' six or eight times until the 'false' bug
>> goes away, and that leaves me at the end of the bisect without finding
>> the individual commit that's causing my 'real' bug.
>>
>> How do you experts handle this kind of problem?
> 
> If you can identify the commit that fixes the unrelated problem you can
> try to cherry-pick it during the bisect.

Thanks Andreas. With an eye to doing that, is there an easy way to get a list of all the commits included in Linus's merge? (I mean a more accurate list than Linus casually mentions in his commit message.)

Trying to build that mental model I mentioned: All the commits from Tejun Heo are dated mid-December but Linus didn't commit them until mid-January. When I'm bisecting through that merge, git builds the kernels with names like vmlinuz-3.2.0-rc5-foo, i.e. names a month older than Linus's current kernel version. Where does git get those older names during the bisect? And does my working tree exclude all of Linus's commits made later than 3.2.0-rc5-foo?

Many thanks.