On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 03:51:04PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > > This is still marked RFC, because there are really two approaches here, > > and I'm not sure which one is better for "format-patch --base". I'd like > > to get input from Xiaolong Ye (who worked on --base), and Josh Triplett > > (who has proposed some patches in that area, and is presumably using > > them). > > Thanks. > > I'd love to see a more resilient patch-id mechanism, to make it easier > to match up patches between branches. I don't think it makes sense to > talk about the patch-id of a merge commit (though it might make sense > for a merge which makes additional changes not present in any of the > parents). Even if someone wants to match up merge commits with merge > commits, I don't think that should happen via patch-id; I think that > should happen in terms of "what patches does this merge introduce", > without constructing a merge-patch-id via a Merkle tree of commit > patch-ids. > > So, I think this patch series makes sense (modulo the comments about the > commit message in patch 3). We already don't respect merge commits when > doing format-patch; this seems consistent with that. If we ever make it > possible for format-patch to handle merge commits, then we should also > allow it to have merge commits as prerequisites. Thanks for the input. I knew that format-patch doesn't show merge commits, but I didn't realize that merges were skipped entirely for the base preparation (but I see it now; there is a "rev.max_parents = 1" setting in prepare_bases). So this really doesn't change the output there at all. And in fact, the switch to: if (commit_patch_id(commit, &diffopt, sha1, 0)) - die(_("cannot get patch id")) + continue; should never hit that continue. It could be: die("BUG: somehow a merge got fed to commit_patch_id?"); but the "continue" somehow seems like the right thing to me. I'll wait another day or so for comments and then send the re-roll using this approach. -Peff