Re: How to find where a branch was taken from.

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 21, 2008, 18:48 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130803211148r651d03eev98a478b13e69f710@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20080321183225.GA13583@hashpling.org>

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Charles Bailey <charles@hashpling.org> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

>  > In order to do this, however, I'm forced to remember where I got my
>  > "original" version from, which isn't even that important.  As the
>  > developer of a particular patch, all I *really* should have to know
>  > is: a) here are the things I added since I made my topic branch, and
>  > b) here is the branch I want to rebase them onto so I can submit my
>  > cleaned patches upstream.
>
>  Why are you forced to remember?
>
>  If you don't want to transplant the patches onto where the remote
>  branch is now, then you just need to pick a commit on your current
>  branch that is before any commit that you want to reorder/recombine
>  and do a git rebase -i <sha1>. (It should be easy to pick a commit
>  from git log. Perhaps it's the first one with and author that isn't
>  you.  [...]

All these things work, but they're unnecessarily tedious manual remembering. If I have a lot of topic branches on the go at once, things start getting a little messy and it's hard to remember which patches came from where, particularly if I'm aggregating, reviewing, and cleaning up patches from several people at work before sending them upstream (in which case I don't always recognize the checkin messages presented in git-rebase -i).

svn has "svn log --stop-on-copy", which is useful in exactly this situation. A git branch is not really a "copy", of course, so the actual implementation can't be the same.

"git show-branch" has logic very close to what we need here: if you give it the names of your current branch and its parent, it'll show you just the changes on both branches since the branchpoint. But I don't really want to know about additional changes on the parent, only on the branch I'm working with, and I often prefer the output to be in git-log's (very flexible) format instead of git-show-branch.

Have fun,

Avery