On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 10:11:02AM +0200, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>=
 wrote:
quoted text
> >> BTW. does it mean that "git merge a b" might be not the same as
> >> "git merge b a"?
> >>=20
> >=20
> > No. Git merges all the sub-things together and then merges the result
> > of that jumble into the branch you're on.
> >=20
> > Someone might have to correct me on that, but that's as far as I've
> > understood it.
>=20
> From what I understand from above explanation, and from thread on git
> mailing list about better implementation of and documenting finding
> merge bases for multiple heads, I think octopus merge is done by merging
> [reduced] heads one by one into given branch.
>=20
> This means that "git merge a b" does internally "git merge a; git merge b"
> as I understand it.

Sure, but given that both 'a' and 'b' merged (so none of them is subset
of the other, for example so that reduce_heads() would drop one of them)
the order of the parents will be different so the resulting commit will
differ. The resulting tree will no, I think.