Allow git bisect in reverse mode?

Brad Davis· Sep 11, 2018, 19:52 UTC · lore

I'm currently trying to determine when an issue was fixed in a long list of commits. I attempted to do this by running `git bisect` and marking the commit where I knew it was broken as bad, and the tip as good, but I got back an error message saying that good revs weren't ancestors of bad ones.

I'm currently working around this by mentally reversing the meanings of good and bad, but it feels unnatural and error prone to have to say `good` when I encounter the failure and `bad` when i don't.

Couldn't git simply do the same thing and internally reverse the meaning of good and bad if the bad revision is an ancestor of the good?

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason· Sep 11, 2018, 19:55 UTC · re: Brad Davis · lore

Re: Allow git bisect in reverse mode?

On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 9:54 PM Brad Davis <bdavis@saintandreas.org> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> I'm currently trying to determine when an issue was fixed in a long
> list of commits.  I attempted to do this by running `git bisect` and
> marking the commit where I knew it was broken as bad, and the tip as
> good, but I got back an error message saying that good revs weren't
> ancestors of bad ones.
>
> I'm currently working around this by mentally reversing the meanings
> of good and bad, but it feels unnatural and error prone to have to say
> `good` when I encounter the failure and `bad` when i don't.
>
> Couldn't git simply do the same thing and internally reverse the
> meaning of good and bad if the bad revision is an ancestor of the
> good?

This feature already exists. See --term-{old,good}=* in the "git-bisect" manpage.