How do you get git bisect to ignore merged branches?

Question

I\'m aware that git bisect is branch-aware by design, so that if between good commit, G, and bad commit, B, you merged in a branch, it needs to take those changes into consi

Answer 1

I've been looking for something like this too. As far as I've got is that git rev-list --bisect --first-parent seems to do what you want to, and the docs for rev-list implies that the --bisect option is what bisect uses internally - but getting git bisect to add that flag to its call(s) to rev-list seems less trivial:

The bisect command is implemented by a shell script git-bisect, which in turn uses a builtin command bisect--helper to actually do the interesting part ("computation, display and checkout" says the comment...), apparently based on a bunch of magic state files in .git/. And it seems to be the rev-list command that is reusing code from bisect--helper rather than the other way around as you might expect.

So, you'd have to extend the bisect--helper code's commit filtering to do it, I think.

As a workaround, something like this might work: after bisect checks something out for you, reset to a different one using git rev-list --bisect --first-parent, test that and mark it good/bad/skip and continue from there.