Book Image

Git Version Control Cookbook

Book Image

Git Version Control Cookbook

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Git Version Control Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Debugging with git bisect


The git bisect command is an excellent tool to find which commit caused a bug in the repository. The tool is particularly useful if you are looking at a long list of commits that may contain the bug. The bisect command performs a binary search through the commit history to find the commit that introduced the bug as fast as possible. The binary search method, or bisection method as it is also called, is a search method where an algorithm finds the position of a key in a sorted array. In each step of the algorithm, the key is compared to the middle value of the array and if they match, the position is returned. Otherwise, the algorithm repeats its search in the subarray to the right or left of the middle value, depending on whether the middle value was greater or lower than the key. In the Git context, the list of commits in the history makes up for the array of values to be tested, and the key can be a test if the code can be complied successfully at the given commit...