From: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:47:37 GMT
Subject: Re: How to say HEAD~"all the way back - 1"
Message-ID: <20070222204737.GC18622@fieldses.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vodnmdk8y.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 12:12:45PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Sorry, there is no such shorthand, but you could obviously say:
> 
> 	$ git rev-list --parents HEAD | grep -v ' '
> 
> A way to find the root commit seems to be one of the things
> people new to git want at least once, once they start futzing
> with the tool.  But I suspect that is only because they need
> that information to see how the tool works (say "what different
> output would I get out of 'git show $commit' for root and other
> commits?"), and not because they need that information for any
> real life use.
> 
> Really, what useful purpose does it serve for you to find out
> the root commit, OTHER THAN being able to say "the development
> history of this project starts at this commit"?

I occasionally want to reference commits not relative to "all the way
back" but to "all the way back on this branch".  So, e.g., what's the
next-to-last commit before "topic" meets up with "origin"?

I can do something like

	git rev-list origin..topic | tail -2 | head -1

but in practice it's faster just to fire up gitk origin.. and
cut-n-paste object id's.

--b.