I appreciate the context provided by Peff and understand now that bitmap index is not compatible with my goal. Experimenting again today, I might have set up the test repository wrong the first time I tried with 2.3.5. Formatting likely never worked with --use-bitmap-index. Therefore, I can simply remove its usage from the parser I have, as it has been broken from the beginning. I also agree this is a documentation issue. If rev-list docs mentioned it, I wouldn't have filed it as a bug. It would be extra nice if incompatible options were better handled as Junio says. Thank you both for your response.
