Comment by xg15

Project FOO, Chapter 5, Verse 18-27 (King Linus Version)

And 171b25e, after one hundred sixty and two log entries begat fe961ca. And 171b25e continued as a tagged branch after it begat fe961ca while the author made eight hundred more log entries, and begat further experimental feature branches. And when the number of log entries wase nine hundred sixty and two, 171b25e's branch was closed.

After fe961ca was sixty and five years log entries, and was known as e56b8bd, who begat 882b79d. And e56b8bd was rebased to the project root after it begat 882b79d.

And 882b79d preceded a hundred eighty and seven log entries and was then known as b6ff3ed, and begat 99e395a. And b6ff3ed continued after it begat 99e395a for seven hundred eighty and two log entries and begat many experimental feature branches.

And the current HEAD of the house of proj/foo.git is still 99e395a.

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Joke aside, technically that problem has been solved before.

For a serious answer, "git log" should be very durable, and if you want a nice graph with it, something like this has benefits of both text and graphs:

    git log --graph --pretty=format:'%h -%d %s (%cr) <%an>' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

Well, can you draw an average commit graph, such as that for the Linux kernel, in such a way that it is both accurate and you can draw some insight from it?

What are the interesting things about a git commit graph? Usually not the whole graph, but significant branches, commits and merges.

"Tim branched v1.3 to work on feature E for a while. Important features A,B,C and fix D was commited to master in the meantime. Tim merged E shortly before the v1.4 release was made."

Of course, generating such a description cannot be automated, while generating a graph can.

IMHO tig does this pretty well.

https://github.com/jonas/tig

Text + formatting. I could just as well ask "describe a git commit hash as an image in an unambiguous way"