Commits labeled "M"

[Nick Stoughton]

I see some commits are labeled "M" in the Bamboo Code Commits Tab (and repeated on the Summary tab). What does this mean?

[Tim Crall]

It means that those commits were the result of a merge.

[Marcin Gardias]

They are merged commits. Idea is if you merge multiple commits and then the build fails we only notify the person doing the merge rather than marking half your team as responsible. To indicate the commits that are not taken into account when we determine responsibility, notifications and so on, we flag them with 'M'

[mikhail_matrosov]

How exactly bamboo understands, which new commits were "merged" and which were not? Git does not know which branch a commit was originally committed into. I'm interested in a general case, when we do not use pull requests and perform merges manually.

[Marcin Gardias]

We use heuristics that checks at ancenstry path between previous and the current build. If a commit is not on the path, it's most probably a 'merged' commit. Obviously, this doesn't always work, but is good enought for typical setup.

[mikhail_matrosov]

Fair enough. Is this something more complicated than simply walking to the first parent each time? Is it documented? And can we change this behavior?

[G__Sylvie_Davies__bit-booster_com_]

They are merge commits.

Hmm, I don't see them in my Bamboo install (5.10.0).

They make a lot more sense if you install one of the commit-graph add-ons available in marketplace.atlassian.com and the look at them in Bitbucket Server (search for "commit graph"):

490a7183-2c90-459e-8773-3429085b1f7f.png

I recommend Bit-Booster Commit Graph.

But I'm biased.  I'm the author of that add-on.  

Perhaps I should port it to Bamboo!