Re: [RFC/PATCH] log: add log.firstparent option

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 6:23 PM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

This patch adds an option to turn on --first-parent all the
time, along with the corresponding --no-first-parent to
disable it. The "why" of this requires a bit of backstory.

Some projects (like git.git) encourage frequent rebasing to
generate a set of clean, bisectable patches for each topic.
The messy sequence of bug-ridden and bug-fixup commits is
lost in the rebase, and not part of the final history.

But other projects prefer to keep the messy history intact.
For one thing, it makes collaboration on a topic easier, as
developers can simply pull from each other during the messy
development. And two, that history may later be useful when
tracking down a bug, because it gives more insight into the
actual thought process of the developer.

But in this latter case you want _two_ views of history. You
may want to see the "simple" version in which a series of
fully-formed topics hit the branch (and you would like to
see the diff of their final form). Or you may want to see
the messy details, because you are digging into a bug
related to the topic.

One proposal we have seen in the past is to keep the messy
history as a "shadow" parent of the real commits. That is,
to introduce a new parent-like header into the commit
object, but not traverse it by default in "git log". So it
remains hidden until you ask to dig into a particular topic
(presumably with a "log --show-messy-parents" option or
similar). So by default you get the simple view, but can dig
further if you wish.

But we can observe that such shadow parents can be
implemented as real parents; the problem isn't one of the
underlying data structure, but how we present it in "git
log". In other words, a perfectly reasonable workflow is:

  - make your messy commits on a side branch

  - do a non-fast-forward merge to bring them into master.
    The commit message for this merge should be meaningful
    and describe the topic as a whole.

  - view the simple history with "git log --first-parent -m"

  - view the complex history with "git log"

But since you probably want to view the simple history most
of the time, it would be nice to be able to default to that,
and switch to the more complicated view with a command line
option. Hence this patch.

Suggested-by: Josh Bleecher Snyder <redacted>
---
This came out of a discussion I had with Josh as OSCON. I
don't think I would personally use it, because git.git is
not a messy-workflow project. But I think that GitHub pushes
people into this sort of workflow (the PR becomes the
interesting unit of change), and my understanding is that
Gerrit does, as well.

Github pull request messages
are similar to cover letters, so you could send a series with a
good cover letter, but crappy unfinished patches inside the series.
After applying all patches it could be all nice, i.e. compiles, tests, adds the
new functionality. It might be just a commit in between which may not even
compile. That's my understanding of the messy-workflow.

Gerrit cannot provide such a workflow easily as it's rather commit
centric and not branch centered. So you need to approve each
commit on its own and until 2 weeks ago you even needed to submit
each commit. (By now Gerrit has learned to submit a full branch, that
is you submit a commit and all its ancestors will integrate as well if they
were approved.)
Previously when the ancestors were not approved the commit would be
"submitted, merge pending", so it would wait for each commit to be approved
and submitted.
And because of this commit-centric workflow, the crappy commit in the series
is put into spot light.

Apart from that, the first-parent option gains some traction currently, Compare
https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/52381/ for example ;)

There are probably some other things we (and others) could
do to help support it:

  - currently "--first-parent -p" needs "-m" to show
    anything useful; this is being discussed elsewhere, and
    it would be nice if it Just Worked (and showed the diff
    between the merge and the first-parent)

  - the commit messages for merges are often not great. A
    few versions ago, I think, we started opening the editor
    for merges, which is good. GitHub's PR-merge includes
    the PR subject in the commit message, but not all of the
    rationale and discussion. And in both git-generated and
    GitHub-generated messages, the subject isn't amazing
    (it's "merge topic jk/some-shorthand", which is barely
    tolerable if you use good branch names; it could be
    something like the subject-line of the cover letter for
    the patch series).

    So I think this could easily be improved by GitHub (we
    have the PR subject and body, after all). It's harder
    for a mailing list project like git.git, because Git
    never actually sees the subject line. I think it would
    require teaching git-am the concept of a patch series.

This would be cool I would imagine.

    I don't know offhand what Gerrit merges look like.

Let's say it's complicated. Depending on configuration a few things
may happen. There are different integration strategies
* merge always
* merge if necessary (fastforward else)
* fastforward only
* rebase if necessary (to make it a linear history)
* cherrypick (which may add footers like Reviewed-by: to have that
information in the git history)

I think the "merge always" strategy would comfort from this patch.

  - we already have merge.ff to default to making extra
    merge commits. And if you use GitHub's UI to do the
    merge, it uses --no-ff. I don't think we would want
    these to become the default, so there's probably nothing
    else to be done there.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <redacted>

The signoff is better placed above :)