Tom Prince wrote:
quoted text
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 11:03:36AM +0100, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>> Steffen Prohaska wrote:
>>> On Nov 1, 2007, at 10:11 AM, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>>>> It's easier to bisect. If git bisect lands you on a merge-commit,
>>>> you need to start a new bisect for each of the parents included
>>>> in the merge. Hopefully the nature of the merge gives a clue so
>>>> the user can make an educated guess as to which parent introduced
>>>> the bogus commit, but for an "evil octopus" (unusual) or if the
>>>> merge had conflicts which were resolved in a buggy way (not
>>>> exactly uncommon), it can be quite a hassle to get things right.
>>>> With a mostly linear history, this problem goes away.
>>> This is really an interesting point. I did not start to use
>>> git bisect regularly. But I certainly plan to do so in the future.
>>> Couldn't bisect learn to better cope with non-linear history?
>> Perhaps it could, but it's far from trivial. I started hacking on
>> a wrapper for git-bisect which would do just that, but gave up
>> rather quickly as the book-keeping required to remember each and
>> every parent-point tried just got out of hand, and it *still*
>> wouldn't run in full automatic. It broke down because I also
>> wanted merges on non-first-line parents to be delved into. If
>> that didn't happen, I wouldn't *know* the bisect would run fine
>> without me watching it, so then it was as useless as if I'd have
>> had to sit there the entire time anyway.
> 
> I haven't had occasion to use git-bisect much, but I was under the
> impression that bisect could already handle merges, or any other shaped
> history just fine.
> 

It appears the code supports your statement. I started writing on my
hack-around about a year ago, and the merge-handling code got in with
1c4fea3a40e836dcee2f16091bf7bfba96c924d0 at Wed Mar 21 22:16:24 2007.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so paranoid about useless merges anymore then.
Hmm. I shall have to look into it. Perhaps Junio can clarify how it
works? The man-page was terribly silent about how git-bisect handles
merges.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231
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