Re: FYI, git output messages are being used by other tooling

From: Theodore Tso

Date: Tue Oct 20 2026 - 15:16:50 EST


On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 11:37:01AM -0500, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > The change is being addressed:
> >
> > https://lore.kernel.org/all/20261009-ktest-git-bisect-v1-1-1d1428f6cbf4@xxxxxxxxxxxx/
> >
> > But I figured it would be good for you to know about this dependency.
>
> Shouldn't the script instead seeing "git show bisect/bad" instead?
>

I wonder if we should have something like a "git bisect --format=json"
option to facilitate programs that are running git bisect in some kind
of automation. Steven's email caused me to check my test appliance[1]
but fortunately the only thing I depend on is whether the otuput of
"git bisect good/bad" has a string which contains "is the first bad
commit" or not. If someone has a commit with the one-line summary
which contains that string, or if git ever changed the git bisect text
output, or someone tried to set LANG to Chinese or some such, hilarity
would ensue. :-)

[1] https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/test-appliance/files/usr/local/lib/gce-server/util/git/git.go

A structured output that contained the result of the "git bisect
good|bad", and the first bad commit if it has been found, would be
certainly be a more reliable way for automated git bisection harneses
to rely upon. It'd be great if that was something that was in git
3.0.

- Ted