Re: [PATCH 1/2] revision: Denote root commits with '#'

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 23, 2021, 18:07 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqh7n74jdt.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <009a01d6ef80$326572d0$97305870$@pdinc.us>

"Jason Pyeron" <jpyeron@pdinc.us> writes:

Show 25 quoted lines

> Summary: --graph used with --oneline sometimes produces ambiguous
> output when more than one commit has no parents and are not yet
> merged
> ...
>> "(branch name)" in the output, instead of painting the commit in the
>> graph by replacing the '*' node with something else.
>> 
>> And how often do you really need to see commits near the root, say
>> the earliest 100 commits, in the 35k+ commit history?  Is it really
>> necessary to tell which among these 100 is the root?  
>
> Yes, and the assumption that they are at the beginning is flawed too.
>
> $ git log --oneline --graph --all | cat -n | egrep $(git rev-list --max-parents=0 --all | cut -c 1-8 | tr '\n' '|' | head -c -1)
>     87  | | * be2c70b7 bug 2252 test case (e.g. for tomcat 9 with unpackWARs=false)
>   2161  | | * 8ef73128 Add migrate-from-blackfat.sql
>   2164  | | * 5505e019 initial
>   2235  | | | | | | | | | | | | | * 83337c67 intial
>   2921  | | | | * ca14dc49 Initial commit
>   2931  | | | * cbdce824 initial commit
>   2963  | | * 8f1828c1 Base applet
>   2971  | * 658af21f parrent pom
>   3026  * 8356af31 Initial commit from Create React App
>
> git log --oneline --graph produces 3026 lines in this example.

Hmph. Are you saying that you have 3000+ root commits in the 35k+ history?

Whether we add '[root]' decoration to the true roots (like '(branchname)' decoration we add to branch tips), or painted '*' in a different color (like '#'), you do not have to look for 'initial', so having that many roots will not be a problem per-se with respect to the "log" output, but there must be something strange going on.

I am not going to ask you why you need so many roots, because I suspect that I will regret asking ;-).

By the way, I sense that your problem description is flip-flopping again and I can no longer keep track of. The way I read the message I got from Kyle was, even when a graph has two commits that have no parents in the visible part of the history, either Kyle wanted (or Kyle got an impression after talking to you that you wanted) to see these differently if one of them is a root and the other is non-root (but happens to have none of its parents shown due to A..B range). And that is why I started asking how meaningful to special case only "root".

Now the message from you I am responding to in the "Sumary" above says that it is not "root" but is about the placement of graph nodes.

So, I dunno, with changing the description of the goalpost. Now it is that "root" is so not special at all and we only care about that the a commit, none of whose parents are in the part of the shown history, is shown in such a way that the user can tell that any unrelated commits shown in the graph near it are not parents of such a commit? Or do you still want to show such a commit in two ways, one for root and one for the ones above the boundary?