"git bisect" tries to test an unexpectedly large number of revisions

Question

When I run:

git bisect start <bad_commit> <good_commit>

I get:

Bisecting: 9727 revisions left to test after this (roughly 13 steps)

But the bad_commit and good_commit I specified are clearly only around 50 commits back in history. I did a "git log" and saw both of the commits there. I also verified the bad commit is more recent than the good commit.

What's going on here?

Answer 1

If you merged in a long-lived branch bisect by default will hunt through the whole branch. Easy way to wall off the side histories is to add --first-parent , that'll tell you the merge that brought the bug.