The need to check for null above strikes me as rather inconvenient - what if CalculateHistoryDivergence() just returned an empty HistoryDivergence if either side is null?

Your code here could then be as simple as:

this.div = branch.IsTracking ? repo.ObjectDatabase.Calculate... : new HistoryDivergence();

And each property here would simply defer to div.

As it's quite a lower level method, I'd rather keep CalculateHistoryDivergence() expect valid Commits to work with.

I've pushed some additional commits to actually delegate more to the HistoryDivergence type. How does those feel?

I agree with you, though, that the null checks are pretty ugly. Any idea about how to make this prettier?

@dahlbyk @carlosmn I'm really lacking some inspiration about how to express what this method does/returns. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

How about

Retrieves some details about the graph relationship between those
two commits such as their best ancestor, if any, and the distance from this latter and the commits

/cc @ethomson @jamill @ben

Some details but not others?

Returns the merge base (best common ancestor) of the given commits and the distance between each commit and this base.

maybe?

Returns the merge base (best common ancestor) of the given commits and the distance between each commit and this base.

This is nice.

What @ethomson said.

I'd say amend to say "distance between each of these commits", as "each commit" sounds odd now.

👍 for @carlosmn's suggestion.

@carlosmn The NameWhisperer