A major part of the "convoluted walk" is the (il-)logic that skipped

earlier SEEN parents and treated the first unseen one as if it was the

first parent, which is not exactly Stephen's fault.  It was placed by

yours truly in the very original code but it was done without much

thought.
I think your patch is the correct fix for that convolution, regardless of

the traversal order stability issue Stephen mentions.

--

I agree that Lars' patch prevents parts of the tree to go "dark" (so did

my patch).

However, without either patch, that implies that the current --first-parent

code has a high probability of obscuring parts of the tree depending on

traversing order (in any tree which contains at least one merge).
So, I'd say, since the current code does not and cannot work reliably

for anyone specifically using --first-parent (with every merge

encountered, the probability of correctness is multiplied by 0.5 at

most/least), you are going to do them a favour anyway by fixing the code,

then why not simplify the convolution and make the code rock-steady (and

implement my patch)?
Anyone using --first-parent in production now has an embarrassingly high

probability of missing commits in his generated lists (I know that I

noticed the problem within 5 minutes from actually trying to use the

flag to get meaningful output).  So fixing and simplifying the code now

is rather unlikely to create any more surprises than the current code

already presents to existing users (if any).

--

Sincerely,                                                          srb@cuci.nl

           Stephen R. van den Berg.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?

--

The current 'next' branch in git.git contains your patch with my fixup

on top and I believe this fixes _both_ the original issue with

first-parent (thanks to your patch) and the issue Nanako discovered

(thanks to my patch). Am I missing something?
--

larsh

--

Probably not.  I didn't check 'next' yet, since neither mine nor your

patch had been Acked on the list (I guess it shows that I don't know the

procedures here all too well yet).

--

Sincerely,                                                          srb@cuci.nl

           Stephen R. van den Berg.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?

--