On Nov 18, 2014, at 10:39 AM, Andreas Schwab wrote:

>Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> What's more natural than asking for the Nth previous commit?
>
>In a DAG it's ambigous.

I think it's more nuanced than that.  Very often in practice commits happen
linearly and in those cases, it's unambiguous.  When merging in feature
branches and such, then yes, technically the multiple parents results in
ambiguity.  Even so, a first-parent default would in practice usually give you
the answer you want.  You can almost always ignore the details of the merge
(of course, with command line overrides for when you need to delve deeper).

Bazaar uses a first-parent default because it promotes a "main line of
development" work flow, which is almost always what you (well, *I* :) want.

Cheers,
-Barry