Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, 9 May 2007, Daniel Barkalow wrote: > > > The discussion about having a header to specify, for a revert commit, > > what it reverts made me realize that this header *would* be useful, but > > that we don't need a *new* header for it. I think that the right method > > is to add the parent of the reverted commit as a second parent for the > > revert. > > I am not so sure. In a sense, you are correct. But everybody who does "git > log --no-merges" would no longer see reverts. Which is somewhat incorrect. Right. I've actually done what Daniel just talked about doing in one of my "production" repositories. I did it by hand as a developer had created a bad merge and accidentially reverted 800 files during that merge. 80 or so commits later along a public non-rewinding branch coworkers realized things weren't right, and asked me to fix the mess. As I wanted to save the blame data when I reverted-the-revert I did what Daniel suggests. But since the revert-the-revert wasn't really an interesting point in history, and neither was the bad merge, I don't really care that neither shows up with --no-merges. The original bad merge was a simple honest mistake made by a developer who was new to Git, and was only caused because merge-recursive wasn't installed properly on that system. As Dscho says, most reverts are interesting points in time. *Why* a particular revert was done is important. And so I have to disagree quite a bit with Daniel's idea, for exactly that reason. If I'm looking at a block of code in a file I want to know why its there. If blame tells me its a revert of something, that tells me we tried another path and it didn't work out. I might be sitting here looking at this line because I'm thinking of redoing whatever it was that wasn't good! So that revert commit message better say why that thing didn't work out. If I really do care about the source of that line, I can always re-run blame on the parent of the reverted commit (hence why ^ is so nice as a suffix on a commit-ish!) and examine the line again. Hmm. I should teach git-gui to parse out the revert message and let you click into its parent. Simple enough. Maybe it will be in 0.7.0. Maybe it won't be. ;-) -- Shawn. - 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
