Re: frustrated forensics: hard to find diff that undid a fix

[Jonathan del Strother <maillist@steelskies.com>]

On 5 March 2011 06:20, Adam Monsen <haircut@gmail.com> wrote:
> I made a fix a month ago on the master branch in a shared repo. A week
> later, a colleague did a merge that undid the fix. I didn't figure out
> the problem until just now because I'd been assuming the fix was still
> on master. I mean, if it wasn't, I should see a reverse patch using "git
> log -p master", right? Wrong. Turns out the fix was undone as part of
> merge conflict resolution (I think).
>
> Is there some way to include merge conflict resolutions in "git log -p"
> or "git show"? Apparently some important information can be hidden in
> the conflict resolution. Or, more likely, I just don't understand how
> this bit of git works.
>
> I also tried bisect and pickaxe. Bisect wrongly identified the first bad
> commit, and pickaxe just didn't see the change at all.
>
>    ~ * ~
>
> Here's some details in case anyone wants to (a) point out where I messed
> up or (b) help me avoid this kind of blunder in the future.
>
> 1. The repo is git://mifos.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/mifos/head
> (mirror: https://github.com/mifos/head ). Branch master.
>
> 2. My commit 2a1ed0436 introduced a fix that includes the text
> "native2ascii". Shows up in "git log -p -1 2a1ed0436" and "git show
> 2a1ed0436". Life is good.
>
> 3. It appears that the merge commit 0f8132386 tossed my "native2ascii"
> fix. The only way I could figure out to actually visualize this is "git
> diff 58320586..0f813238".
>
> This took a while to figure out. Am I missing something obvious?


Seems like a bunch of people (myself included) have been tripped up by
this behaviour in the past few months.   Did something change to start
this, or has it always been there?

-Jonathan