log: --remerge-diff needs to keep around commit parents

To show a remerge diff, the merge needs to be recreated. For that to
work, the merge base(s) need to be found, which means that the commits'
parents have to be traversed until common ancestors are found (if any).

However, one optimization that hails all the way back to cb115748ec0d
(Some more memory leak avoidance, 2006-06-17) is to release the commit's
list of parents immediately after showing it _and to set that parent
list to `NULL`_. This can break the merge base computation.

This problem is most obvious when traversing the commits in reverse: In
that instance, if a parent of a merge commit has been shown as part of
the `git log` command, by the time the merge commit's diff needs to be
computed, that parent commit's list of parent commits will have been set
to `NULL` and as a result no merge base will be found (even if one
should be found).

Traversing commits in reverse is far from the only circumstance in which
this problem occurs, though. There are many avenues to traversing at
least one commit in the revision walk that will later be part of a merge
base computation, for example when not even walking any revisions in
`git show <merge1> <merge2>` where `<merge1>` is part of the commit
graph between the parents of `<merge2>`.

Another way to force a scenario where a commit is traversed before it
has to be traversed again as part of a merge base computation is to
start with two revisions (where the first one is reachable from the
second but not in a first-parent ancestry) and show the commit log with
`--topo-order` and `--first-parent`.

Let's fix this by special-casing the `remerge_diff` mode, similar to
what we did with reflogs in f35650dff6a4 (log: do not free parents when
walking reflog, 2017-07-07).

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/t/t4069-remerge-diff.sh b/t/t4069-remerge-diff.sh
index 07323ebafe..a68c6bfa03 100755
--- a/t/t4069-remerge-diff.sh
+++ b/t/t4069-remerge-diff.sh
@@ -317,4 +317,11 @@ test_expect_success 'remerge-diff turns off history simplification' '
 	test_cmp expect actual
 '
 
+test_expect_success 'remerge-diff with --reverse' '
+	git log -1 --remerge-diff --oneline ab_resolution^ >expect &&
+	git log -1 --remerge-diff --oneline ab_resolution >>expect &&
+	git log -2 --remerge-diff --oneline ab_resolution --reverse >actual &&
+	test_cmp expect actual
+'
+
 test_done