Re: Strange git merge behaviour with empty branches

Will Deacon [off-list ref] writes:

Any thoughts?

What is recorded in Octopus merges is a rather torn issue.  The original
motivation was to allow recording anything the user throws at us, even
though some are ancestors of others, without reducing them to the minimum
set of parents that are necessary to represent the full history, because
that is after all what the user wanted to do. You see some of that there.

On the other hand, there was an edict from the original maintainer that we
shouldn't record useless merge parents, so there were some changes in that
direction to cull obviously redundant parents from the parent list.

But over time, novelty of Octopus merges waned, and nobody serious uses it
for real work these days, except when bored and being curious, playing
around and seeing what it does.

An advice for an end-user is "Don't throw meaningless parents at
Octopus. It will do whatever it does, and the only guarantee you are
getting is that it does not record wrong parents, it may omit obviously
redundant parents, and it will never discard an independent parent."

An advice for a developer is to update it to make sure only the
independent parents are recorded; "show-branch --independent" may be a
good tool to compute them