7 ms·

The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History

394 points by gary_bernhardt 10y ago

cpobrien 10y ago
There is a mention of the 66 parent merge from Linus himself: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=139033182525831 http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=139033182525831
- gary_bernhardt 10y ago
  Whoa, you're right! He referenced it neither by 7-character short hash nor by full hash, and I didn't think to check intermediate hash lengths. I've updated the post to reference that email.
  - auscompgeek 10y ago
    The kernel devs recommend using 12-character commit hash abbreviations: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html#describe-your-changes https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-pa... (bottom of the section has a git config snippet)
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  > "Christ, that's not an octopus, that's a Cthulhu merge"
  - bigiain 10y ago
    Related - from Twitter recently: https://twitter.com/HenryHoffman/status/694184106440200192/photo/1 https://twitter.com/HenryHoffman/status/694184106440200192/p...
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Never change, Torvalds, never change.
- wcummings 10y ago
  >Anyway, I'd suggest you try to limit octopus merges to ~15 parents or less to make the visualization tools not go crazy. Maybe aim for just 10 or so in most cases. I'll file this under "problems I'm glad I don't have".
tomatokiller 10y ago
Has anyone asked Laxman Dewangan what he was up to with that initial commit and merge thing?
- geofft 10y ago
  It's common in a lot of Git UIs (GitHub, for instance) to prompt you to create a README when you create a new repo. I think this is because when you're actually starting a project, older versions of git would get confused if you cloned an empty repo, but using `git clone` to get a directory to work in is much nicer than `git init` + do work + `git remote add origin` + `git push -u` or whatever the command is. So, the hosting tool generates an initial commit for you so that a clone works smoothly. My guess is that Nvidia has some internal Git hosting tool or a private GitHub account, and this developer clicked the most obvious "create a repo" button and tried to push their local git clone of Linux it. That push was rejected because it would have clobbered the auto-generated commit, so they did a `git pull` and a `git push`, i.e., they merged in the auto-generated commit.
- caf 10y ago
  Yes, Linus did. See this thread: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1603.2/01926.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1603.2/01926.html
smallnamespace 10y ago
Slight article nitpick: a distribution that 'looks like a straight line' in a log-log plot is often not power-law distributed. One could say that the distribution has a fat one-sided tail though.
- gary_bernhardt 10y ago
  I thought about trying to clarify this, but "power law" is the term that's been thrown around to describe this effect in software systems for many years. Really, I only care about the fat-one-sided-ness (for its practical implications); I don't care so much about the precise mathematical formulation.
curuinor 10y ago
Clauset Shalizi Newman 2007 has not-nice things to say about the classic physicist's idiot trick of fitting power law distributions by drawing a straight line on a log-log graph: it's got huge bias. https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062 https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062 However, the other difficult thing about power law distributions is that the dataset size requirements for proper determination of the fact that it's a power law distribution are occasionally incredibly difficult. So their critique is very strong, given the comparative lack of data. It is often the case that computer systems, with the overflowing reams of data, are still not enough. Note that the paper I cited up there suggests MLE and then a Kolmogorov-Smirnoff test, so it'll say a lot of things aren't power laws that could well be. Another way to look at it is from a more geometric point of view. The metric entropy of any generic system of variables is defined as the sum of the positive Lyapunov exponents: and as an "entropy" that quantity does have a lot of commonalities with the other entropies. But to have positive Lyapunov exponents is often to have a chaotic dynamics, so it could just be conjectured that the time series of commits and merge octopus sizes in kernel git history is chaotic, so the evolution of the time series will be fractal in nature. But it's also really fucking hard to confirm or deny that one, because there are varied and strange definitions of chaos itself and the methods that have been suggested to measure Lyapunov exponent in real systems are arcane and difficult. You could try some synchronization methods, but they remain arcane and crap. Fractal measurement methods are also shitty and full of dark magic. One neat little trick might be to discretize the series, symbolic dynamics-style (it's already discretized but discretize further, into like percentiles or something) and run it through one of the dynamical machine learning dealies to see if there's patterns. Not too much literature on that but it's a thing that some randoes in like 2004 or something did
- gary_bernhardt 10y ago
  I removed the "power law" language from the post, other than a quick "this is often called a power law, which probably isn't correct" note. I don't want to get bogged down in statistics when all I really care about here is "it's fat and one sided".
  - xapata 10y ago
userbinator 10y ago
GitHub's logo always reminds me of the octopus merge; not sure if it was chosen for this reason, but I think it's quite suitable.
- azernik 10y ago
  Given that the name refers to octopus ("octocat"), it's very likely.
metrognome 10y ago
I think Gary's commit counts are off: $ git log | wc -l This should count the number of lines in the entire git log, including metadata (not just commits). I think he means this: $ git log --oneline | wc -l The number of commits for Rails should be closer to 61,000.
- geofft 10y ago
  The number is right, the command is just misprinted: titan:~/src/linux geofft$ git log --oneline 566cf87 | wc -l 649306
- gary_bernhardt 10y ago
  That would explain why the commit frequency seemed to improbably high. I just updated it with correct numbers. Thanks.
- js2 10y ago
  You can also use: git rev-list --count HEAD
SEJeff 10y ago
Some of my favorite commits come from Rusty Russel, who wrote the lguest toy hypervisor documentation as a story: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f938d2c892db0d80d144253d4a7b7083efdbedeb#diff-847230dec604827964905e0dfec81e42R1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f938d2c892db0d80d14...
geofft 10y ago
Another interesting piece of trivia: the very first more-than-two-parent merge in the kernel history is a mistake. The second and third parents are the same commit. commit 13e652800d1644dfedcd0d59ac95ef0beb7f3165 Merge: 4332bdd 88d7bd8 88d7bd8 Author: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@shinybook.infradead.org> Date: Sun May 8 13:23:54 2005 +0100 Merge with master.kernel.org:/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
behm 10y ago
That was the worst diagram today. <1 Commits on the y-axis? Where would be 30 on the x-axis? Can't tell if you only have 3 markers on a log axis.
- gary_bernhardt 10y ago
  What were you trying to do, locate your favorite commit?
brongondwana 10y ago
It only has one parent, but this would be the commit that I'm least proud of (not in Linux, obviously): https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd/commit/fdc0eb3d09bcc2ce916d2790c98839a61d403937 https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd/commit/fdc0eb3d09bc... Showing 126 changed files with 14,128 additions and 20,617 deletions. (ok, I'm pretty proud of reducing code size by 6k+ lines while improving lots of stuff, but the commit is a shitshow)
gsylvie 10y ago
I don't like OP's definition of divergence. I prefer to take the size of the diff along first-parent instead. Here's how I would do it: time git log -m --first-parent --shortstat --pretty="%H" --min-parents=2 | grep -v '^$\|3e1dd193edefd2a806a0ba6cf0879cf1a95217da' | sed 's/.* file.* changed,//' | sed 's/insertion.*,/+/' | sed 's/deletion.*//' | sed 's/insertion.*//' | sed 's/^\ $.*$\ $/\$$\(\1$\)/' | xargs -d '\n' -L 2 echo echo | bash | sort -k 2,2 -g Note: I skip 3e1dd193edefd2a806a0ba6cf0879cf1a95217da because that commit has no diff along first-parent, and thus screws up my xargs result (which depends on every 2nd line having the --shortstat output). Of course "--first-parent" doesn't guarantee that we're walking the mainline (see: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/04/stop-foxtrots-now/ https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/04/stop-foxtrots-n... ), but it usually is. On my laptop it takes 3 mins 30 seconds. Here are the 5 biggest merges by this definition: 099bfbfc7fbbe22356c02f0caf709ac32e1126ea 463702 3f17ea6dea8ba5668873afa54628a91aaa3fb1c0 466320 ce519e2327bff01d0eb54071e7044e6291a52aa6 500074 7ea61767e41e2baedd6a968d13f56026522e1207 504965 f063a0c0c995d010960efcc1b2ed14b99674f25c 569691 And here's "git show" for those 5: 099bfbfc7fbb 2015-06-26T13:18:51-07:00 Merge branch 'drm-next' of git://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/linux 3f17ea6dea8b 2014-06-08T11:31:16-07:00 Merge branch 'next' (accumulated 3.16 merge window patches) into master ce519e2327bf 2009-01-06T17:04:29-08:00 Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-2.6 7ea61767e41e 2009-09-16T08:11:54-07:00 Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-2.6 f063a0c0c995 2010-10-28T12:13:00-07:00 Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-2.6
- gsylvie 10y ago
  This approach also helps with those orphan branches since it just calculates the diff caused by bringing the orphan branch into the mainline. Whereas OP's definition counts every line ever created on both sides (e.g., counts every line of code in the original project as well as the orphan at the moment of the merge).
  - majewsky 10y ago
    If you want the diff caused by bringing a topic branch into master (i.e. its unmerged parts), you can also do git diff master...topic with three dots instead of two.
kijin 10y ago
> "Christ, that's not an octopus, that's a Cthulhu merge" Perhaps git should throw a warning when you try to do an octopus merge with more parents than an octopus has legs. If you really want to proceed, add the --cthulhu option. The default behavior would be --no-cthulhu.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Because Git totally needs more obscure command line options. /s
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  I think I might add a no-op '--no-cthulhu' flag to my next project, just because I like the ring of it so much.
cperciva 10y ago
Octopuses are more common than you might expect The etymologically correct plural is octopodes. (Some people accuse "octopodes* of being pedantic, but as I see it "pedantic" is just a euphemism for "correct in a way I don't like".)
- avar 10y ago
  'The standard pluralized form of "octopus" in the English language is "octopuses" although the Ancient Greek plural "octopodes", has also been used historically.'[1]. The book "Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate"[2] which I have here says this on the matter: "By the way, the plural of octopus isn't octopi, because the word is Greek -- octopus to be exact -- not Latin. The Greek plural would be octopodes, but we call them octopuses." You're not being pedantic as it pertains to this word in the English language, you're just wrong. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluralization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluraliz... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Octopus-Intelligent-Invertebrate-Roland-Anderson/dp/1604690674 https://www.amazon.com/Octopus-Intelligent-Invertebrate-Rola...
  - cperciva 10y ago
    I didn't say commonly used; I said etymologically correct. The word "octopus" comes from Greek, just like the word "corpus" comes from Latin (and has the etymological plural "corpora").
    - shezi 10y ago
      But isn't etymology descriptive, instead of prescriptive? And if it's prescriptive, how far do you want to go, etymologically? According to Wiktionary[1], the term originates from a Proto-Indo-European language (but doesn't give plural forms for those roots). And isn't it also the case that once a word gets accepted into a language, it becomes a word in that language, no matter where it comes from? There are _several_ examples of such words, in all the European languages. The word "common", for example, dates back to Latin "communis", and I'm pretty sure the adverbial form for that isn't "communisly", so why the exception for Octopus? [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%8D%CF%82#Ancient_Greek https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%8D%CF%82#Anci...
majewsky 10y ago
I used octopus merges once for a deployment system that I built when my team switched from SVN to Git. Since there were a lot of developers working on different parts, it was many times required to test multiple different changes in parallel in the QA system. I built a small web UI where developers could select and unselect development branches, and it would octopus-merge all selected branches into the master branch, and force-push that state onto the QA branch (and deploy it to QA, of course). So QA would always be master + all development branches that were currently being verified. By using a Github webhook, it would update the QA system whenever master or one of the branches being verified was pushed to. I'm not in that team anymore, but I think that deployment tool is still humming along nicely.
- rwmj 10y ago
  There must have been many times this would fail because of merge conflicts?

394 points by gary_bernhardt 10y ago

There is a mention of the 66 parent merge from Linus himself: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=139033182525831 http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=139033182525831

gary_bernhardt 10y ago
Whoa, you're right! He referenced it neither by 7-character short hash nor by full hash, and I didn't think to check intermediate hash lengths. I've updated the post to reference that email.
- auscompgeek 10y ago
  The kernel devs recommend using 12-character commit hash abbreviations: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html#describe-your-changes https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-pa... (bottom of the section has a git config snippet)
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
> "Christ, that's not an octopus, that's a Cthulhu merge"
- bigiain 10y ago
  Related - from Twitter recently: https://twitter.com/HenryHoffman/status/694184106440200192/photo/1 https://twitter.com/HenryHoffman/status/694184106440200192/p...
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Never change, Torvalds, never change.
wcummings 10y ago
>Anyway, I'd suggest you try to limit octopus merges to ~15 parents or less to make the visualization tools not go crazy. Maybe aim for just 10 or so in most cases. I'll file this under "problems I'm glad I don't have".

tomatokiller 10y ago

Has anyone asked Laxman Dewangan what he was up to with that initial commit and merge thing?

geofft 10y ago
It's common in a lot of Git UIs (GitHub, for instance) to prompt you to create a README when you create a new repo. I think this is because when you're actually starting a project, older versions of git would get confused if you cloned an empty repo, but using `git clone` to get a directory to work in is much nicer than `git init` + do work + `git remote add origin` + `git push -u` or whatever the command is. So, the hosting tool generates an initial commit for you so that a clone works smoothly. My guess is that Nvidia has some internal Git hosting tool or a private GitHub account, and this developer clicked the most obvious "create a repo" button and tried to push their local git clone of Linux it. That push was rejected because it would have clobbered the auto-generated commit, so they did a `git pull` and a `git push`, i.e., they merged in the auto-generated commit.
caf 10y ago
Yes, Linus did. See this thread: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1603.2/01926.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1603.2/01926.html

smallnamespace 10y ago

Slight article nitpick: a distribution that 'looks like a straight line' in a log-log plot is often not power-law distributed. One could say that the distribution has a fat one-sided tail though.

gary_bernhardt 10y ago
I thought about trying to clarify this, but "power law" is the term that's been thrown around to describe this effect in software systems for many years. Really, I only care about the fat-one-sided-ness (for its practical implications); I don't care so much about the precise mathematical formulation.

curuinor 10y ago

Clauset Shalizi Newman 2007 has not-nice things to say about the classic physicist's idiot trick of fitting power law distributions by drawing a straight line on a log-log graph: it's got huge bias. https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062 https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062 However, the other difficult thing about power law distributions is that the dataset size requirements for proper determination of the fact that it's a power law distribution are occasionally incredibly difficult. So their critique is very strong, given the comparative lack of data. It is often the case that computer systems, with the overflowing reams of data, are still not enough. Note that the paper I cited up there suggests MLE and then a Kolmogorov-Smirnoff test, so it'll say a lot of things aren't power laws that could well be. Another way to look at it is from a more geometric point of view. The metric entropy of any generic system of variables is defined as the sum of the positive Lyapunov exponents: and as an "entropy" that quantity does have a lot of commonalities with the other entropies. But to have positive Lyapunov exponents is often to have a chaotic dynamics, so it could just be conjectured that the time series of commits and merge octopus sizes in kernel git history is chaotic, so the evolution of the time series will be fractal in nature. But it's also really fucking hard to confirm or deny that one, because there are varied and strange definitions of chaos itself and the methods that have been suggested to measure Lyapunov exponent in real systems are arcane and difficult. You could try some synchronization methods, but they remain arcane and crap. Fractal measurement methods are also shitty and full of dark magic. One neat little trick might be to discretize the series, symbolic dynamics-style (it's already discretized but discretize further, into like percentiles or something) and run it through one of the dynamical machine learning dealies to see if there's patterns. Not too much literature on that but it's a thing that some randoes in like 2004 or something did

gary_bernhardt 10y ago
I removed the "power law" language from the post, other than a quick "this is often called a power law, which probably isn't correct" note. I don't want to get bogged down in statistics when all I really care about here is "it's fat and one sided".
- xapata 10y ago

userbinator 10y ago

GitHub's logo always reminds me of the octopus merge; not sure if it was chosen for this reason, but I think it's quite suitable.

azernik 10y ago
Given that the name refers to octopus ("octocat"), it's very likely.

metrognome 10y ago

I think Gary's commit counts are off: $ git log | wc -l This should count the number of lines in the entire git log, including metadata (not just commits). I think he means this: $ git log --oneline | wc -l The number of commits for Rails should be closer to 61,000.

geofft 10y ago
The number is right, the command is just misprinted: titan:~/src/linux geofft$ git log --oneline 566cf87 | wc -l 649306
gary_bernhardt 10y ago
That would explain why the commit frequency seemed to improbably high. I just updated it with correct numbers. Thanks.
js2 10y ago
You can also use: git rev-list --count HEAD

SEJeff 10y ago

Some of my favorite commits come from Rusty Russel, who wrote the lguest toy hypervisor documentation as a story: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f938d2c892db0d80d144253d4a7b7083efdbedeb#diff-847230dec604827964905e0dfec81e42R1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f938d2c892db0d80d14...

geofft 10y ago

Another interesting piece of trivia: the very first more-than-two-parent merge in the kernel history is a mistake. The second and third parents are the same commit. commit 13e652800d1644dfedcd0d59ac95ef0beb7f3165 Merge: 4332bdd 88d7bd8 88d7bd8 Author: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@shinybook.infradead.org> Date: Sun May 8 13:23:54 2005 +0100 Merge with master.kernel.org:/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git

behm 10y ago

That was the worst diagram today. <1 Commits on the y-axis? Where would be 30 on the x-axis? Can't tell if you only have 3 markers on a log axis.

gary_bernhardt 10y ago
What were you trying to do, locate your favorite commit?

brongondwana 10y ago

It only has one parent, but this would be the commit that I'm least proud of (not in Linux, obviously): https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd/commit/fdc0eb3d09bcc2ce916d2790c98839a61d403937 https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd/commit/fdc0eb3d09bc... Showing 126 changed files with 14,128 additions and 20,617 deletions. (ok, I'm pretty proud of reducing code size by 6k+ lines while improving lots of stuff, but the commit is a shitshow)

gsylvie 10y ago

I don't like OP's definition of divergence. I prefer to take the size of the diff along first-parent instead. Here's how I would do it: time git log -m --first-parent --shortstat --pretty="%H" --min-parents=2 | grep -v '^$\|3e1dd193edefd2a806a0ba6cf0879cf1a95217da' | sed 's/.* file.* changed,//' | sed 's/insertion.*,/+/' | sed 's/deletion.*//' | sed 's/insertion.*//' | sed 's/^\ $.*$\ $/\$$\(\1$\)/' | xargs -d '\n' -L 2 echo echo | bash | sort -k 2,2 -g Note: I skip 3e1dd193edefd2a806a0ba6cf0879cf1a95217da because that commit has no diff along first-parent, and thus screws up my xargs result (which depends on every 2nd line having the --shortstat output). Of course "--first-parent" doesn't guarantee that we're walking the mainline (see: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/04/stop-foxtrots-now/ https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/04/stop-foxtrots-n... ), but it usually is. On my laptop it takes 3 mins 30 seconds. Here are the 5 biggest merges by this definition: 099bfbfc7fbbe22356c02f0caf709ac32e1126ea 463702 3f17ea6dea8ba5668873afa54628a91aaa3fb1c0 466320 ce519e2327bff01d0eb54071e7044e6291a52aa6 500074 7ea61767e41e2baedd6a968d13f56026522e1207 504965 f063a0c0c995d010960efcc1b2ed14b99674f25c 569691 And here's "git show" for those 5: 099bfbfc7fbb 2015-06-26T13:18:51-07:00 Merge branch 'drm-next' of git://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/linux 3f17ea6dea8b 2014-06-08T11:31:16-07:00 Merge branch 'next' (accumulated 3.16 merge window patches) into master ce519e2327bf 2009-01-06T17:04:29-08:00 Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-2.6 7ea61767e41e 2009-09-16T08:11:54-07:00 Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-2.6 f063a0c0c995 2010-10-28T12:13:00-07:00 Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-2.6

gsylvie 10y ago
This approach also helps with those orphan branches since it just calculates the diff caused by bringing the orphan branch into the mainline. Whereas OP's definition counts every line ever created on both sides (e.g., counts every line of code in the original project as well as the orphan at the moment of the merge).
- majewsky 10y ago
  If you want the diff caused by bringing a topic branch into master (i.e. its unmerged parts), you can also do git diff master...topic with three dots instead of two.

kijin 10y ago

> "Christ, that's not an octopus, that's a Cthulhu merge" Perhaps git should throw a warning when you try to do an octopus merge with more parents than an octopus has legs. If you really want to proceed, add the --cthulhu option. The default behavior would be --no-cthulhu.

majewsky 10y ago
Because Git totally needs more obscure command line options. /s
ghostly_s 10y ago
I think I might add a no-op '--no-cthulhu' flag to my next project, just because I like the ring of it so much.

cperciva 10y ago

Octopuses are more common than you might expect The etymologically correct plural is octopodes. (Some people accuse "octopodes* of being pedantic, but as I see it "pedantic" is just a euphemism for "correct in a way I don't like".)

avar 10y ago
'The standard pluralized form of "octopus" in the English language is "octopuses" although the Ancient Greek plural "octopodes", has also been used historically.'[1]. The book "Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate"[2] which I have here says this on the matter: "By the way, the plural of octopus isn't octopi, because the word is Greek -- octopus to be exact -- not Latin. The Greek plural would be octopodes, but we call them octopuses." You're not being pedantic as it pertains to this word in the English language, you're just wrong. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluralization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluraliz... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Octopus-Intelligent-Invertebrate-Roland-Anderson/dp/1604690674 https://www.amazon.com/Octopus-Intelligent-Invertebrate-Rola...
- cperciva 10y ago
  I didn't say commonly used; I said etymologically correct. The word "octopus" comes from Greek, just like the word "corpus" comes from Latin (and has the etymological plural "corpora").
  - shezi 10y ago
    But isn't etymology descriptive, instead of prescriptive? And if it's prescriptive, how far do you want to go, etymologically? According to Wiktionary[1], the term originates from a Proto-Indo-European language (but doesn't give plural forms for those roots). And isn't it also the case that once a word gets accepted into a language, it becomes a word in that language, no matter where it comes from? There are _several_ examples of such words, in all the European languages. The word "common", for example, dates back to Latin "communis", and I'm pretty sure the adverbial form for that isn't "communisly", so why the exception for Octopus? [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%8D%CF%82#Ancient_Greek https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%8D%CF%82#Anci...

majewsky 10y ago

I used octopus merges once for a deployment system that I built when my team switched from SVN to Git. Since there were a lot of developers working on different parts, it was many times required to test multiple different changes in parallel in the QA system. I built a small web UI where developers could select and unselect development branches, and it would octopus-merge all selected branches into the master branch, and force-push that state onto the QA branch (and deploy it to QA, of course). So QA would always be master + all development branches that were currently being verified. By using a Github webhook, it would update the QA system whenever master or one of the branches being verified was pushed to. I'm not in that team anymore, but I think that deployment tool is still humming along nicely.

rwmj 10y ago
There must have been many times this would fail because of merge conflicts?