On 1/18/21 3:33 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
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?
Okay, I see what you mean. Fixing --graph to avoid implying ancestry sounds like a better approach to me.
That being said, I spoke to Jason recently, and he expressed interest in optionally marking root commits so they are easy to search for in a graph with something like /# in `less`. I see value in this, too.
So would you be open to my modifying of the patch in question (patch 1+2 squashed, I guess) to instead use "--mark-roots=<mark>" to optionally mark root commits with a string <mark>, and pursue fixing the --graph rendering issue in another series?
If so, what would you like to see out of the --left-right issue? Maybe "--mark-left-root=<mark>" and "--mark-right-root=<mark>", so multi-byte strings may be used? Can there be more than one root on either side? (so the option would use a plural "roots" instead of "root"?)
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