revision: --show-pulls adds helpful merges

The default file history simplification of "git log -- <path>" or
"git rev-list -- <path>" focuses on providing the smallest set of
commits that first contributed a change. The revision walk greatly
restricts the set of walked commits by visiting only the first
TREESAME parent of a merge commit, when one exists. This means
that portions of the commit-graph are not walked, which can be a
performance benefit, but can also "hide" commits that added changes
but were ignored by a merge resolution.

The --full-history option modifies this by walking all commits and
reporting a merge commit as "interesting" if it has _any_ parent
that is not TREESAME. This tends to be an over-representation of
important commits, especially in an environment where most merge
commits are created by pull request completion.

Suppose we have a commit A and we create a commit B on top that
changes our file. When we merge the pull request, we create a merge
commit M. If no one else changed the file in the first-parent
history between M and A, then M will not be TREESAME to its first
parent, but will be TREESAME to B. Thus, the simplified history
will be "B". However, M will appear in the --full-history mode.

However, suppose that a number of topics T1, T2, ..., Tn were
created based on commits C1, C2, ..., Cn between A and M as
follows:

  A----C1----C2--- ... ---Cn----M------P1---P2--- ... ---Pn
   \     \     \            \  /      /    /            /
    \     \__.. \            \/ ..__T1    /           Tn
     \           \__..       /\     ..__T2           /
      \_____________________B  \____________________/

If the commits T1, T2, ... Tn did not change the file, then all of
P1 through Pn will be TREESAME to their first parent, but not
TREESAME to their second. This means that all of those merge commits
appear in the --full-history view, with edges that immediately
collapse into the lower history without introducing interesting
single-parent commits.

The --simplify-merges option was introduced to remove these extra
merge commits. By noticing that the rewritten parents are reachable
from their first parents, those edges can be simplified away. Finally,
the commits now look like single-parent commits that are TREESAME to
their "only" parent. Thus, they are removed and this issue does not
cause issues anymore. However, this also ends up removing the commit
M from the history view! Even worse, the --simplify-merges option
requires walking the entire history before returning a single result.

Many Git users are using Git alongside a Git service that provides
code storage alongside a code review tool commonly called "Pull
Requests" or "Merge Requests" against a target branch.  When these
requests are accepted and merged, they typically create a merge
commit whose first parent is the previous branch tip and the second
parent is the tip of the topic branch used for the request. This
presents a valuable order to the parents, but also makes that merge
commit slightly special. Users may want to see not only which
commits changed a file, but which pull requests merged those commits
into their branch. In the previous example, this would mean the
users want to see the merge commit "M" in addition to the single-
parent commit "C".

Users are even more likely to want these merge commits when they
use pull requests to merge into a feature branch before merging that
feature branch into their trunk.

In some sense, users are asking for the "first" merge commit to
bring in the change to their branch. As long as the parent order is
consistent, this can be handled with the following rule:

  Include a merge commit if it is not TREESAME to its first
  parent, but is TREESAME to a later parent.

These merges look like the merge commits that would result from
running "git pull <topic>" on a main branch. Thus, the option to
show these commits is called "--show-pulls". This has the added
benefit of showing the commits created by closing a pull request or
merge request on any of the Git hosting and code review platforms.

To test these options, extend the standard test example to include
a merge commit that is not TREESAME to its first parent. It is
surprising that that option was not already in the example, as it
is instructive.

In particular, this extension demonstrates a common issue with file
history simplification. When a user resolves a merge conflict using
"-Xours" or otherwise ignoring one side of the conflict, they create
a TREESAME edge that probably should not be TREESAME. This leads
users to become frustrated and complain that "my change disappeared!"
In my experience, showing them history with --full-history and
--simplify-merges quickly reveals the problematic merge. As mentioned,
this option is expensive to compute. The --show-pulls option
_might_ show the merge commit (usually titled "resolving conflicts")
more quickly. Of course, this depends on the user having the correct
parent order, which is backwards when using "git pull master" from a
topic branch.

There are some special considerations when combining the --show-pulls
option with --simplify-merges. This requires adding a new PULL_MERGE
object flag to store the information from the initial TREESAME
comparisons. This helps avoid dropping those commits in later filters.
This is covered by a test, including how the parents can be simplified.
Since "struct object" has already ruined its 32-bit alignment by using
33 bits across parsed, type, and flags member, let's not make it worse.
PULL_MERGE is used in revision.c with the same value (1u<<15) as
REACHABLE in commit-graph.c. The REACHABLE flag is only used when
writing a commit-graph file, and a revision walk using --show-pulls
does not happen in the same process. Care must be taken in the future
to ensure this remains the case.

Update Documentation/rev-list-options.txt with significant details
around this option. This requires updating the example in the
History Simplification section to demonstrate some of the problems
with TREESAME second parents.

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 25 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/revision.c b/revision.c
index 8136929e23..f89dd6caa5 100644
--- a/revision.c
+++ b/revision.c
@@ -870,7 +870,19 @@ static void try_to_simplify_commit(struct rev_info *revs, struct commit *commit)
 			}
 			parent->next = NULL;
 			commit->parents = parent;
-			commit->object.flags |= TREESAME;
+
+			/*
+			 * A merge commit is a "diversion" if it is not
+			 * TREESAME to its first parent but is TREESAME
+			 * to a later parent. In the simplified history,
+			 * we "divert" the history walk to the later
+			 * parent. These commits are shown when "show_pulls"
+			 * is enabled, so do not mark the object as
+			 * TREESAME here.
+			 */
+			if (!revs->show_pulls || !nth_parent)
+				commit->object.flags |= TREESAME;
+
 			return;
 
 		case REV_TREE_NEW:
@@ -897,6 +909,10 @@ static void try_to_simplify_commit(struct rev_info *revs, struct commit *commit)
 				relevant_change = 1;
 			else
 				irrelevant_change = 1;
+
+			if (!nth_parent)
+				commit->object.flags |= PULL_MERGE;
+
 			continue;
 		}
 		die("bad tree compare for commit %s", oid_to_hex(&commit->object.oid));
@@ -2265,6 +2281,8 @@ static int handle_revision_opt(struct rev_info *revs, int argc, const char **arg
 	} else if (!strcmp(arg, "--full-diff")) {
 		revs->diff = 1;
 		revs->full_diff = 1;
+	} else if (!strcmp(arg, "--show-pulls")) {
+		revs->show_pulls = 1;
 	} else if (!strcmp(arg, "--full-history")) {
 		revs->simplify_history = 0;
 	} else if (!strcmp(arg, "--relative-date")) {
@@ -3019,7 +3037,8 @@ static struct commit_list **simplify_one(struct rev_info *revs, struct commit *c
 	if (!cnt ||
 	    (commit->object.flags & UNINTERESTING) ||
 	    !(commit->object.flags & TREESAME) ||
-	    (parent = one_relevant_parent(revs, commit->parents)) == NULL)
+	    (parent = one_relevant_parent(revs, commit->parents)) == NULL ||
+	    (revs->show_pulls && (commit->object.flags & PULL_MERGE)))
 		st->simplified = commit;
 	else {
 		pst = locate_simplify_state(revs, parent);
@@ -3602,6 +3621,10 @@ enum commit_action get_commit_action(struct rev_info *revs, struct commit *commi
 			/* drop merges unless we want parenthood */
 			if (!want_ancestry(revs))
 				return commit_ignore;
+
+			if (revs->show_pulls && (commit->object.flags & PULL_MERGE))
+				return commit_show;
+
 			/*
 			 * If we want ancestry, then need to keep any merges
 			 * between relevant commits to tie together topology.