[turaw]

> ...this is solved by the named branches in Mercurial... I'm not super-familiar with Mercurial (and only somewhat-familiar with git), but couldn't you get the same effect as named branches by just not deleting fully merged branches in git?

> ... how can you tell which one of the parents is the previous commit in the master ...

You can use --first-parent [1] to disambiguate that. In a nutshell, the master branch in your example would be the first parent, letting you disambiguate (and there's support for this in a lot of other git tools!)

[1]: https://git-blame.blogspot.ca/2012/03/fun-with-first-parent....

[sofal]

The --first-parent history can be ruined pretty easily by an inexperienced Git user. They'll use their local master as their feature branch for days and then they'll try to push it. Git will unhelpfully tell them to first do a "git pull" before pushing. So they do, which leaves them with a bullshit "merged master into master" merge commit and then they push that shit, thereby guaranteeing that --first-history will always omit the actual history of where origin/master was and instead take a trip through this dude's little feature adventure.

[turaw]

Yikes. Fair enough; that would definitely trip it up!