Re: [BUG] git-log shows first parent and repeated last for octopus merge

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

Hi,

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Jakub Narebski wrote:

quoted

When trying to find how many merges and how many octopus merges (merges with
more than two parents) are in git.git repository I have encountered the
following strange output of git-log:

 1000:jnareb@roke:~/git> git log --parents --full-history --max-count=1 \
   211232bae64bcc60bbf5d1b5e5b2344c22ed767e -- a//b
 commit 211232bae64bcc60bbf5d1b5e5b2344c22ed767e <last parent repeated>
 Merge: d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b... d0d0d0b...
 [...]

This happens because a//b rewrites the history, i.e. the parents are 
edited. IMHO it makes no sense at all to show the parents in such a case, 
since they are bogus.

If the command line did not have --full-history, I would agree
with you.  The caller explicitly told us not to remove side
branches that do not end up modifying the paths, and also told
us, with --parent, to show parenthood information after removing
intermediate commits that do not change the tree shape (with
respect to the specified paths).

So it is showing what the user asked -- the user may not have
understood what he was asking, but that is a separate problem, I
would think.