Re: [DRAFT] Branching and merging with git

linux@horizon.com writes:

We seem to have developed a consensus on the desirability of allowing
HEAD to point outside refs/heads, postponing the check until
commit/merge time.  (At least, junkio and Linus seemed to like it.)

Yes, and I am actually interested in at least doing the initial
damage assessment myself but people are welcome to beat me to
it.  The easies part would be to just try writing a bare SHA-1
to .git/HEAD with:

	H=$(git-rev-parse --verify HEAD)
        echo $H >.git/HEAD

and see what breaks and start picking up the pieces from there.

I'd like to learn more about the zillion options to git-log.
If people feel like sharing useful incantations, it would be
be very helpful to give a concrete example of its usefulness,
preferably within the git history itself.

(Are there any octopus merges in git's history?  If not, could I ask
for one for pedagogical value?)

git.git itself is full of them, but the very first octopus (it
actually is a pentapus) is rather nice to watch in gitk:

	211232bae64bcc60bbf5d1b5e5b2344c22ed767e

You can look for them with:

	git rev-list --parents HEAD | grep '..* ..* ..* ..* ..* ..*'

Repeat as many " ..*" as the number of parents you would want to require.
I knew the very first one was pentapus (I did it) so I wrote six ..*
there (one for the commit, one each for parents).

Len's dodecapus in linux-2.6.git is this one:

	9fdb62af92c741addbea15545f214a6e89460865

It is very interesting to watch it with "git show".  Len has
another one in August:

	da547d775fa9ba8d9dcaee7bc4e960540e2be576