As for now, until the fully backport-connected history is finished and the patch to gitk is in, you can reduce the clutter in the gitk view by using: gitk --first-parent 7.8 7.6 7.4 7.2 7.0 0.6 0.5
That doesn't make any difference for my little test case src/pike_memory.c. I use git 1.5.4.3.
Like embee, I'm curious about those backport grafts that appear as merges. Is this only a problem of representation in gitk and git-log? To me it seems odd to describe them as merges since I reckon that content would be identical after a merge.