Re: [PATCH v3 08/13] graph: tidy up display of left-skewed merges

Derrick Stolee [off-list ref] writes:

I hit this very situation recently when I was experimenting with
'git fast-import' and accidentally created many parallel, independent
histories. Running "git log --graph --all --simplify-by-decoration"
made it look like all the refs were in a line, but they were not.
(The one way I knew something was up: the base commits also appeared
without a decoration. That was the only clue that the histories did
not continue in a line.)

quoted

and the fact that B and A do not share parent-child relationships is
lost.  An easy way to show that would be to draw the bottom three
lines of the full history output we saw earlier:

    | * e6277a9 C
    | * 13ae9b2 B
    * afee005 A

either with or without the vertical bar to imply that A may have a
child.

The natural extension of this would be multiple columns:

 | | | | | *
 | | | | *
 | | | *
 | | *
 | *
 *

After sleeping over it, I now think we shouldn't draw lines that
imply a child for each of these commits, as we haven't seen, but
I agree that this can be extended to 3 or more roots.