Re: GIT bisection range errors

[Rene Herman <rene.herman@keyaccess.nl>]

On 09-05-08 01:00, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Fri, 9 May 2008, Rene Herman wrote:

>> I'm in a git bisect and am experiencing strangeness. I did a
>>
>> $ git checkout -b rc v2.6.26-rc1
>> $ git bisect start
>> $ git bisect bad
>> $ git bisect good v2.6.25
>>
>> Yet, during this I'm finding myself at 2.6.25-rc6 and 2.6.25-rc8
>> as the last two results (both good...).
> 
> This is very normal.
> 
> Why?
> 
> Because a lot (in fact, *most*) of the code that was merged after v2.6.25 
> was released was actually *written* and committed long before v2.6.25.
> 
> It just got merged into my tree much later.
> 
> So what happens? The bisection run starts walking into all that history, 
> and that history is *not* based on the released v2.6.25 at all, it's based 
> on much earlier kernels (eg the -rc kernels).
> 
> So what you see is perfectly normal and expected. It's only unexpected if 
> you think of history as a linear thing, but it isn't - it's full of 
> merging of code that was branched off from (much) earlier code points.

Ah. Yes, that needs a bit of thought re-warping, but I guess that makes sense.

Thanks much, was afraid I needed to rebuild my local tree.

Rene.