Re: Occasional wrong behavior of rev-walking (rev-list, log, etc.)

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Depends on why you are running rev-list.

If you want to know if one commit is contained in another, the way
that should work the most reliably is to use merge-base, as the
traversal engine of that command was written not to trust the commit
timestamps but go with the topology alone.

(pardon top-posting and overlong lines; typed in GMail)


On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 09:41:55AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
>>
>> > My guess is that rev-walking is tripping on the fact that this repository
>> > has commit dates in random order.
>>
>> Yeah, that is well known (look for SLOP both in the code and list
>> archive).
>
> I found the recent thread about git describe --contains. (and now I
> realize this is also why git describe --contains doesn't work quite well
> for the same repository).
>
> Now the question is what can we done in the short term? (short of
> introducing something like generation numbers) I tried increasing
> SLOP and to remove the date check (with the hope that making one or
> both configurable might help). Neither fixed the particular test
> case I started this thread with.
>
> Mike