On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, Carlo Wood wrote: > > Well,... when, and because, it's not a linear thing as you mentioned > before - it's not necessarily precisely a cut into half... so I thought, > seeing those weird (not half) numbers that that was the cause.
You're correct - "git bisect" will not always be able to find an exact half-way point, and I was wrong to imply that it will always be quite that close. It's easily off by a few commits because of merges that make it harder to find a good bisection point, but it should never (practically) be off by quite as much as you saw. For example, I could expect that from 127 commits, it would go down to 70 rather than 64. But not to 110 - not unless there are some *really* strange patterns with lots of criss-crossing merges. And indeed, for me, using the same commit ID's as you used, I see a nice bisection to just about exactly half. > > It might be worth it just making sure your git is ok. It really is acting > > oddly. What version is it? > > git version 1.4.4.4 You really do want to use git-1.5.x these days. It does look like 1.4.4.4 may have a bug, although I'm really surprised: we've certainly tweaked stuff in bisection, but I and others have used "git bisect" since long before the git-1.4 days, and it has always worked ok. So I wonder if it's something specific to that debian build. Or possibly to the fact that you have some other dirty state (you might want to do a "git diff HEAD" to see what the changes are, and maybe a "git checkout -f" to get rid of any differences) > I am using Debian (suite 'testing') and trying to be a debian purist - > so it isn't like I can easily upgrade to 1.5.x : there is no debian > package for that version in 'testing'. I'm surprised that debuan > > Nevertheless, if you think it's important - then I can download and > compile a tar ball of course - certainly when I don't have to install > it to test it. > > -- > Carlo Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > PS The result of 'git diff' is: > > diff --git a/include/asm-blackfin/macros.h b/include/asm-blackfin/macros.h > deleted file mode 100644 > index e69de29..0000000 Ok, something deleted an empty file. Probably "make distclean". Our "make clean" is sometimes too aggressive, and we generally shouldn't have empty files. > diff --git a/scripts/package/Makefile b/scripts/package/Makefile > index 7c434e0..f758b75 100644 > --- a/scripts/package/Makefile > +++ b/scripts/package/Makefile but this one has actually been modified. To this: > +# Dummy file > +help: And finally, > diff --git a/scripts/package/builddeb b/scripts/package/builddeb > deleted file mode 100644 > index 6edb29f..0000000 That one also has been actually deleted. And "make distclean" doesn't do that. You have something else going on. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/