On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 10:54:12AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > John Keeping <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > This is helpful when examining branches with disjoint roots, for example > > because one is periodically merged into a subtree of the other. > > > > With the --merge-child option, "git merge-base" will print a > > first-parent ancestor of the first revision given, where the commit > > printed is either a merge-base of the supplied revisions or a merge for > > which one of its parents (not the first) is a merge-base. > > The above two doe snot connect at least to me. The second paragraph > seems to describe how this mysterious mode decides its output to a > sufficient detail, but what the output _means_, and it is unclear > how it relates to gitk/git-gui style merges. > > > For example, given the history: > > > > A---C---G > > \ > > B-----D---F > > \ > > E > > > > we have: > > ... > > $ git log --left-right F...E --not $(git merge-base --merge-child F E) > > < F > > > E > > > > The git-log case is useful because it allows us to limit the range of > > commits that we are examining for patch-identical changes when using > > --cherry. > > Hmph, is this reinventing ancestry-path in a different way? At the > low level machinery, you are finding D to show only F and E, and > your goal seems to be to ignore the side ancestry A--C--G, but it is > not clear if you prefer "E D F"(which would be what F...E would give > in a history limited to ancestry-path, ignoring C) over "E F". I hadn't considered ancestry-path, but I don't think it does what I want. What I want if for LEFT to be B--D--F and RIGHT to be B--E, ignoring A--C--G because I know that none of those are patch identical to anything in B--E. So what I want is more descendant-path than ancestry path in that I don't want anything that isn't a descendant of the merge base of the supplied arguments. > > For example with git-gui in git.git I know that anything > > before the last merge of git-gui is not interesting: > > Can this be extended to find the second last such merge? Or is the > last one always special? In this implementation it only finds the last one because that's where the merge base is. > Still skeptical, but I'll let people discuss it during the feature > freeze ;-). I'm not convinced this is easy to explain myself, which may make it a bad idea. Perhaps a --descendant-path argument to git-log is a better way to help with this case. -- To unsubscribe from this list: 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