Re: Feature request: Exponential search in git bisect

["Manuel Bärenz" <manuel@enigmage.de>]

On 25.10.20 18:15, Philip Oakley wrote:
> Hi Manuel,
>
> On 10/10/2020 10:22, Christian Couder wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 9, 2020 at 9:35 PM Manuel Bärenz <manuel@enigmage.de> wrote:
>>> This feature was requested 8 years ago and briefly discussed:
>>> https://public-inbox.org/git/20120318212957.GS1219@chaosreigns.com/
>>>
>>>
>>>   TL;DR
>>>
>>> Before doing git bisect, I want to use exponential search to
>>> automatically find a good commit, in logarithmic time.
>> Ok, but the conclusion of the above discussion is that the problem
>> with this idea is being able to distinguish between a commit that is
>> bad and a commit where the feature that you want to test cannot be
>> tested for example because it hasn't been implemented yet.
> Does any of the proposed improvement in the "bisect: loosen halfway()
> check for a large number of commits"
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/20201022103806.26680-1-szeder.dev@gmail.com/
> assist in this.

I'm afraid not, since the time to recompile and run tests usually
dominates the search (at least in my case). So the fewer commits have to
be tested, the better.

The hard part is distinguishing in an automated way on an old commit
when to skip and when to mark as good.