On 26/02/04 12:14AM, Kristoffer Haugsbakk wrote:

On Tue, Feb 3, 2026, at 23:48, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Justin Tobler [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Complex merge events may produce an octopus merge where the resulting
merge commit has more than two parents. While iterating through objects
in the repository for git-repo-structure, identify the commit with the
most parents and display it in the output.

Does the size of octopus have anything more than a curiosity value?

I’m guessing this stat is inspired by git-sizer.[1][2] This is all that
the project says about “octopus”:

    * Are there other bizarre and questionable things in your repository?

        * Annotated tags pointing at one another in long chains?
        * Octopus merges with dozens of parents?
        * Commits with gigantic log messages?

It marks the max of 10 in this repo as a “one star” (*) concern
(lowest). The 66 parent commit in the Linux Kernel gets six stars.

Yup, this is taken from git-sizer. From my perspective the max parents
value largely just provides additional insight into how the repository
may have been used/structured.

-Justin