Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > [Footnote] > > *1* Stepping back a bit, I think concentrating too much on "is it > root?" is a wrong way to think about the problem. Suppose you > have two histories, e.g. (time flows from left to right; A and X > are roots) A shorter and more concrete example. Start from an empty repository: $ git init $ git commit --allow-empty -m Aroot $ git checkout --orphan side $ git commit --allow-empty -m Xroot $ git log --all --graph --oneline * a1f7cb2 (HEAD -> side) Xroot * b6fb655 (master) Aroot These depict two root commits, Aroot and Xroot, and no other commits. We do want to show that these two commits do not have parent-child relationship at all, and your (and a few proposals made by other in the past) solution was to show them both with "#". Continuing in the same repository: $ git checkout --orphan another $ git commit --allow-empty -m Oroot $ git commit --allow-empty -m A $ git log --graph --oneline ^another^ another side * eddf116 (HEAD -> another) A * a1f7cb2 (side) Xroot These depict two commits, A and Xroot, and no other commits. We also want to show that these two commits do not have parent-child relationship at all, but if we paint Xroot with "#", it still makes it appear that A is a child of Xroot. > And the right way to look at it is "does A have any parent in > the part of the history being shown?", not "does A have any > parent?" Then 'A' will get exactly the same treatment in the > two examples, and the visual problem that makes A appear as if > it has parent-child relationship with unrelated commit X goes > away. So the condition we saw in your patches, !commit->parents, which attempted to see if it was root, needs to be replaced with a helper function that checks if there is any parent that is shown in the output. Perhaps int no_interesting_parents(struct commit *commit) { struct commit_list *parents = commit->parents; while (parents) { if (!(parents->object.flags & UNINTERESTING)) return 0; parents = parents->next; } return 1; } or something like that should serve as a replacement, i.e. return !commit->parents ? "#" : "*"; would become return no_interesting_parents(commit) ? "#" : "*"; Hmm?