Hello, I think you're right, branch A is a descendant of master. We could change the misleading sentence to "However, if the current branch is a descendant of the other - if its head is a descendant of the other's head - [...]", to link back to the definition of descendant for commits. 2015-10-22 11:06 GMT+02:00 Xue Fuqiao <xfq.free@xxxxxxxxx>: > Hi, > > In Documentation/user-manual.txt: > > In the following, we say that commit X is "reachable" from commit Y > if commit X is an ancestor of commit Y. Equivalently, you could say > that Y is a descendant of X, or that there is a chain of parents > leading from commit Y to commit X. > [...] > However, if the current branch is a descendant of the other--so every > commit present in the one is already contained in the other--then Git > just performs a "fast-forward"; the head of the current branch is > moved forward to point at the head of the merged-in branch, without > any new commits being created. > > I'm a Git newbie. According to my understanding, the "descendant" in > the second paragraph above should be "ancestor". I attempt to represent > my understanding using the following diagram (please see it in a > monospaced font): > > ................................................ > > o--o--o <-- Branch A > / > o--o--o <-- master > > ................................................ > > "master" is the current branch, and (as I understand it) it is an > ancestor of "Branch A", because there is a chain of parents leading from > "Branch A" to master. So "Branch A" (i.e., "the other" branch, or the > "merged-in" branch) is a descendant of master. I even set up a test > repository and attempted to test the above diagram with "git merge-base > --is-ancestor" (and "echo $?"), but it seems to me that the master > branch is *not* a descendant of "Branch A". > > I hope you can understand my words here (English is not my native > language). Can anyone point me in the right direction (what am I > missing)? > -- > 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 -- 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