I noticed bisect does not work well without both good and bad. Running this script in git.git repository would give you quite different results: #!/bin/sh initial=e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290 mid0=`git rev-list --bisect ^$initial --all` git rev-list $mid0 | wc -l git rev-list ^$mid0 --all | wc -l mid1=`git rev-list --bisect --all` git rev-list $mid1 | wc -l git rev-list ^$mid1 --all | wc -l The $initial commit is the very first commit you made. The first midpoint bisects things evenly as designed, but the latter does not. The reason I got interested in this was because I was wondering if something like the following would help people converting a huge repository from foreign SCM, or preparing a repository to be fetched over plain dumb HTTP only: #!/bin/sh N=4 P=.git/objects/pack bottom= while test 0 \< $N do N=$((N-1)) if test -z "$bottom" then newbottom=`git rev-list --bisect --all` else newbottom=`git rev-list --bisect ^$bottom --all` fi if test -z "$bottom" then rev_list="$newbottom" elif test 0 = $N then rev_list="^$bottom --all" else rev_list="^$bottom $newbottom" fi p=$(git rev-list --unpacked --objects $rev_list | git pack-objects $P/pack) git show-index <$P/pack-$p.idx | wc -l bottom=$newbottom done The idea is to pack older half of the history to one pack, then older half of the remaining history to another, to continue a few times, using finer granularity as we get closer to the tip. This may not matter, since for a truly huge history, running bisect number of times could be quite time consuming, and we might be better off running "git rev-list --all" once into a temporary file, and manually pick cut-off points from the resulting list of commits. After all we are talking about "approximately half" for such an usage, and older history does not matter much. Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@xxxxxxx> --- rev-list.c | 2 ++ 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) diff --git a/rev-list.c b/rev-list.c index 963707a..cb67b39 100644 --- a/rev-list.c +++ b/rev-list.c @@ -371,6 +371,8 @@ int main(int argc, const char **argv) save_commit_buffer = verbose_header; track_object_refs = 0; + if (bisect_list) + revs.limited = 1; prepare_revision_walk(&revs); if (revs.tree_objects) - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html