Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Add a new config. option for skipping merges in git-log

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2015 10:53:43 -0700

Koosha Khajehmoogahi <[email-masked]> writes:

> This patch adds a 'showmerges' config. option for git-log.
> This option determines whether the log should contain merge
> commits or not. In essence, if this option is set to false,
> git-log will be run as 'git-log --no-merges'.
>
> To force git-log to show merges even if 'log.showmerges' is
> set, we use --include-merges command line option.

Yuck.

I agree that there is currently no way to revert the setting that is
touched by --merges and --no-merges back to the default, but I think
the right way to fix that is by streamlining these two options,
instead of piling yet another kludge --include-merges on top.

When we think about possible "canned" selection modes:

 (do we show merge commits?) * (do we show non-merge commits?)

we have four combinations.  Answering the above two questions with
No/No would end up showing nothing, which is meaningless, so that
leaves us three choices (of course, the user could choose to futz
directly with min/max-parents to select only Octopus merges, but
that is a more advanced/exotic usage).

Wouldn't it make more sense to spell which selection mode the user
wants with:

	git log --merges=<selection-mode>

by naming the three meaningful selection modes with short and sweet
names?  Perhaps

    default? show? both? -- show both merge commits and non-merge commits
    only -- show only merge commits
    skip -- show only non-merge commits

or something?

Now, as I always say, I am not great at naming things, so do not
take these names as the final suggestion, but I think you got the
idea.

Of course, then the traditional "--merges" option can be kept as a
short-hand for "--merges=only", and "--no-merges" would become a
short-hand for "--merges=skip".

Once we have done that streamlining of the command line options, it
will naturally follow that "log.merges = show | only | skip" would
be a useful configuration option.

I doubt we need an extra bit in rev_info to implement such a syntax
sugar.

> diff --git a/revision.h b/revision.h
> index 0ea8b4e..f496472 100644
> --- a/revision.h
> +++ b/revision.h
> @@ -145,6 +145,7 @@ struct rev_info {
>  	unsigned int	track_linear:1,
>  			track_first_time:1,
>  			linear:1;
> +	unsigned int force_show_merges:1;
>  
>  	enum date_mode date_mode;