Re: On-branch topic description support?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 21, 2022, 17:16 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqwnc6idxr.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <220721.86mtd2tqct.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

> To steal and amend a diagram from git-merge(1), we now have turned this:
>
>
>               A---B---C topic
>              / 
>         X---Y
>              \
>               master
>
> Into this:
>
>               A---B---C---M topic
>              / \         /
>         X---Y   ---------
>              \
>               master

If you mean your topic have 3 commits, then I think you want the first parent of M to be Y, not A, but I agree the above arrangement can also represent what I was discussing.

The thing is, it is unclear if such an artificial merge is an easy thing to maintain by individual contributors. "rebase -i" with some extra options people are not familiar with may be able to reproduce the topology without losing information after you accumulate more commits on top of M (e.g. you build D and E on top of M and now you want to make it A-B-C-D-E merged into Y with M that records the tree of E; you'd amend M's message to talk also about D and E), but "it is possible" is different from "people are comfortable doing".

If M did not have a backpointer to the other parent, and instead were an empty commit, then you recreated what I wrote in the message you are responding to.