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bisect stands for “binary search commit”
Haha, that is a funny misunderstanding. "bisect" stands for bisect. It is a word. It means to cut in half. Because the command cuts the range of suspicious commits into two, then tests which half the problem started in.
to divide into two usually equal parts
But I guess it can be misread as BInary SEarch CommiT.
I swear, I didn't come up with that myself, I read that somewhere else, but of course I don't have a source anymore 🙈 Maybe some git developer is a huge fan of wordplays?
All of this can only work with a clean git history containing only working commits.
This isn't really true.
git bisect skip to skip commits that can't be evaluated. So if you are tracking down the failure of test foo and this commit fails to build, you can skip it.--first-parent to avoid testing inside a development branch. This way you can identify which merge caused the issue, even if other merges had broken commits.So it is easier in general if you have all working commits, but it isn't necessary. Really as long as you have green history on your main branch you will be able to get good results without much effort. I would highly suggest using some sort of merge-queue based workflow to ensure that the master branch is always green.
I would generally prefer using --first-parent rather than forcing squashing. As smaller commits can be much easier to understand and the fact that commit IDs don't change when being merged can make it much easier to manage stacked PRs and hotfix backporting.
I agree that some stuff is easier when not squashing commits, but for the teams I've been working with I've felt that the pros of squashing outweigh the cons, but of course YMMV.
But I didn't know about git bisect skip, thanks for the tip! But sincere question: What happens if there are e.g. three adjacent broken commits? If I have skip all three of those and the error was introduced in one of them, then git cannot tell me which commit introduced the error, right?