On Sat Jul 11, 2026 at 4:15 PM CEST, Mirko Faina wrote:

On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 03:37:49PM +0200, Pablo Sabater wrote:

quoted

When rendering a graph, if the history contains multiple "visual roots",
actual roots or commits that look like roots (i.e. have their parents
filtered out) can end up being vertically adjacent to unrelated commits,
falsely appearing to be related.

A fix for this issue was already attempted [1] a while ago.

This series adds indentation to the visual root commits, so they cannot be
vertically adjacent anymore making it easier to identify them.

 [snip]

Sorry, I know I'm a bit late to the discussion regarding the design,
but, could we maybe have two different code paths for printing graphs?
Having the old one as a default and this new one only when we're using
--oneline (well, --format=reference would benefit too)? As it is now if
I have multiple one-patch series in sequence the entries are
unnecessarily indented.

Thanks

No worries :)

Well, I thought that it could become annoying given the scenario of
having too many visual roots one after the other. But I didn't have a
clear way of having that scenario without forcing it.

I think that this solves an ambiguity so it should be the default option
and someone who doesn't want the indentation has to explicitly unset it
maybe with something like '--no-graph-indent'.

Apart from having an option to disable indentation.

We could have the cascading to have a limit or make it zig-zag:

instead of:

A
  B
    C
      D

We could do:

A
  B
C
  D

This would have its own edge cases like:

A
  B
C <- if we zig-zag here C and D become ambiguous, currently we are
D    indenting only the last commits (visual roots) here we would have
D    to chose between continuing cascading or indenting the first of D.

I'm not so sure if I like the zig-zag solution because we need to think again
if it causes an ambiguity, but I wanted to mention it.

I think we need some more opinions about the design.

Thanks,
Pablo