What are the commits that are linked in a commit

[Michael Nieman]

If I look at a commit in Bamboo (URL ending with "/commits/<commit-hash>"), there seems to always be one or two links to other commits on the right side.  If I click on them it begins a seemingly endless journey down a long line of commits.  What is the significance of the links that appear on a particular commit?

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Michael Nieman

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The screenshot seemingly stems from Bitbucket Server (I guess you reached the screen by clicking the resp. commit on your Bamboo build result).

This line lists the parent commit(s) of the commit you are looking at (the one in your URL ".../commits/<commit-hash>") - regular commits just have a single parent commit, but in this case you seem to be looking at a merge commit, which has two parents.

You should be able to visualize this hierarchy when you navigate one up to the entire commit history (just the ".../commits" URL), here's an example:

As you can see, commit 841b7e6df25 has been merged into another branch, so the resulting merge commit e066465439b now has two parents, namely 841b7e6df25 and the preceding commit 9acdc6a6864 from the target branch. This is exactly what is shown when I navigate to the commit view for e066465439b:

I hope this helps, Cheers,
Steffen

[Michael Nieman]

That makes perfect sense. Thank you for the detailed & timely response!