From: Junio C Hamano Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:08:34 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] revision: add --maximal-only option Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Derrick Stolee writes: > Interesting. Thanks for the correction. So we _do_ have a way to > get this information for a range that doesn't have negative refs > or other custom walk modifiers (and this implementation would be > faster for this case). Perhaps. If so, perhaps we can improve --maximal-only (and possibly rename it to --independent? I dunno about this part) by special casing the logic, and then steer people to use the new implementation that can use negative ends, deprecating "merge-base --independent" (which was written to be a better "show-branch --independent")? > My patch includes test cases that are not covered by the > merge-base command. I don't think it would be valuable to extend > the merge-base command with even more cases that don't actually > output merge-bases / intersections. Yup, I do not think show-branch nor merge-base were good home for the feature. We only needed to make reduce_heads_replace() available somewhere, and "git show --maximal-only A B C" might be a much better way to express "show only the independent ones", as it would allow using all kinds of output options the "log" family of commands support.