Re: git apologia

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > Actually, it turns out neither this nor HEAD~n is what I want.  What I
 > want is to display information about commits N..M where N and M are
 > ordinal numbers from the linear "git log" output.

I'm not sure how you would go about doing that in git.  The ~ notation
follows first parents, as "bzr log -n1" would.  Your use of --skip
seems to be the best way to accomplish what you want.q

 > And waddaya know?  HEAD~n etc. seem to _skip_ merge-commits,

It only seems to do so.  In my (not quite up-to-date) emacs repo,
"git log @address@hidden" displays no merges, but apparently that's because
there's a long sequence of non-merges (fast-forwards) on mainline.
However, "git log @~10..@" displays several, as does
"git log @address@hidden".

Or by "merge-commits" do you mean the off-trunk commits?

 > so (a) the counts end up being wrong, and (b) if you want to see
 > those merge-commits, you need to _know_ they are merge-commits and
 > then use HEAD^2 etc. (i.e.  explicitly request the 2nd parent).
 > This is awful.

If you say so, I guess it is for you.  I'm curious why it's useful to
you.  In the situation I imagine, I typically fire up another terminal
and do "git log | less" rather than try to guess at appropriate n and
m.  Or use gitk.  Is it just that those aren't quite as efficient for
you, or do you have a different purpose for -n..-m?