Subject: Re: How to find and analyze bad merges?

From: "norbert.nemec" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:16:07 +0100

Am 02.02.12 13:03, schrieb Jonathan Nieder:
> David Barr wrote:
>
>> Do the -c --cc or -m flags for git log help in this case?
>> They alter the way merge diffs are presented, as described under Diff Formatting
>> in the git-log(1)  man page.
>
> I suspect Norbert was running into history simplification, so the --full-history
> flag would be the relevant one.

Not quite.

As far as I understand it, history simplification hides the whole branch 
if its changes did not end up in the current branch.

When I tried it out, the --full-history prevented hiding the 
bugfix-commit itself, but it did not show the critical merge commit in 
the log.

> See the thread [1] for a few relevant side-notes.
 >
 > [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/188904

As I understand this thread, the user only requested all commits that 
"modify a file". Our merge-commit strictly speaking did not modify the 
file but simply kept one of the versions, completely swamping all 
modifications from one branch. Exactly the case that is still not 
covered by --full-history.