[eru]

> Other VCSes did support graph histories.

Yes, git ain't the only one, but apart from interface difference, they are pretty much compatible in what they allow you to record in the history, I think?

Part of the problem here is that we use git for two only weakly correlated purposes:

- A history of the code

- Make nice and reviewable proposals for code changes ('Pull Request')

For the former, you want to be honest. For the latter, you want to present a polished 'lie'.

[necovek]

Not really. Launchpad.net does not have any public branches I could share atm as an example, but Bazaar (now breezy) allowed having a nested "merge commit": your trunk would have "flattened" merge commits ("Merge branch foo"), and under it you could easily get to each individual commit by a developer ("Prototype", "Add test"...). It would really be shown as a tree, but smartness was wven richer.

This was made possible by using a DAG for commit storage and referencing, instead of relying on file contents and series of commits per reference. Merge behaviour was much smarter in case of diverging tip or criss-cross merges. But this ultimately was harder and slower to implement, and developers did not value this enough and they instead accepted the Git trade-offs.

So you seamlessly did both with a different VCS without splitting those up: in a sense, computers and software worried about that for us.

[eru]

I am not quite sure what you are describing here. Git's underlying commit graph is a DAG.

You can use different, custom merge-drivers (or whatever it's called) for Git to get the behaviour you describe here.

[necovek]

Certainly, but merges are treated differently by default, and getting to this sort of output would require "custom" tooling for things like "git log".

Whereas bzr just did the expected thing.

[1718627440]

You can select whether you want the diff to the first or the second parent, which is the difference between collapsing and expanding merges. You can also completely collapse merges by showing first-parent-history.

Or I do not understand what you mean with "the expected thing".

[eru]

Yes, `git log --first-parent` has been a godsend for coping with our team's messy non-cleaned up history.

[1718627440]

> - A history of the code

Which is a causal history, not a editing log. So I don't perceive these to be actually different.