Git log exclude/remotes/branches options not working as expected

I have 3 remotes registered in my clone:

origin, fork, drive

When I do:

$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph

I only want to see branches under:

refs/heads/* refs/remotes/origin/*

I tried the following:

$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph --simplify-by-decoration --remote=origin topic1..master

However, I still see refs present in the graph for 'drive' and 'fork' remote tracking branches. I can't tell if these are shown simply because other refs not excluded by my options happen to also be at that SHA1, or if the log command is still generating the graph based on other branches.

What I'm expecting is that I literally see NONE of those excluded refs on the graph, even if other included refs also happen to be positioned at those commits. It's the visualization of the refs I'm concerned about: I have a lot of remote tracking branches in those remotes that clutter the view; I'd rather not see them at all (in addition to the graph not considering them when it is being built/generated). Am I misunderstanding the purpose here? How can I achieve my goals? Documentation hasn't really helped me out here.

Robert Dailey <rcdailey.lists@gmail.com> writes:

I am guessing that the above is not what you actually typed and s/remote/remotes/ is what you did.

According to "git log --help":

    --remotes[=<pattern>]
        Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed on the
        command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit
        remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob. If
        pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.

So your command line is equivalent to

    $ git log --oneline --decorate --graph --simplify-by-decoration \
      refs/remotes/origin/master refs/remotes/origin/topic ... \
      topic1..master

(replace the second line with all the remote-tracking branches you have for "origin").

There is nothing that tells "--decorate" which refs to base its decoration on, so it is reasonable to expect that a commit that happens to match a tip of remote-tracking branches from other remotes are decorated as such, and I think that is what you are seeing.

The decorations are added in log-tree.c::load_ref_decorations() and it does not get anything that says "I want to see decorations based on only these refs", so a short answer is that there is no canned way to do this in today's codebase.

Having said that, I would say it is a reasonable new feature to have. Another related wishlist item might say "decorate only based on tags, not branches or remote-tracking refs".

You can achieve your goals by teaching that codepath to take such new pieces of information, come up with a new command line option [*1*] and add a code to parse your command line option to either builtin/log.c or revisions.c and pass it down the callchain that leads to load_ref_decorations().

[Footnote]

*1* Unfortunately "--decorate=<option>" is already taken to specify the decoration levels, so you would need a different one.