Re: Tracking branch history

Elrond [off-list ref] writes:

Daniel Barkalow <barkalow <at> iabervon.org> writes:

quoted

One feature that might make git more intuitive to people is if we were to 
additionally track the history of what commit was the head of each branch 
over time. This is only vaguely related to the history of the content, but 
it's well-defined and sometimes significant.

E.g., if you know that two weeks ago, what you had worked, but it doesn't 
work now, you can use git-bisect to figure out what happened, but first 
you have to figure out what commit it was that you were using two weeks 
ago. Two weeks ago, we had that information, but we didn't keep it.

On a related issue:

Looking at a commit:
   commit id-commit
   parent id-1
   parent id-2
   parent id-3

       Merge branch 'branch-2', 'branch-3'

One can tell the name of the branches for id-2 and id-3 (branch-2, 3),
but one can't tell the name of id-1.

That's deliberate.  If you are merging into a branch other than
"master", the message would say:

        commit ea892b27b15fbc46a3bb3ad2ddce737dc6590ae5
        Merge: 7278a29... 8d48ad6...
        Author: Junio C Hamano [off-list ref]
        Date:   Sat May 13 18:49:54 2006 -0700

            Merge branch 'lt/config' into next

            * lt/config:
              git config syntax updates
              Another config file parsing fix.
              checkout: use --aggressive when running a 3-way merge (-m).
              Fix git-pack-objects for 64-bit platforms
              fix diff-delta bad memory access

The point is to keep the punch line as short and meaningful for
the most common case.