Re: master^ is not a local branch -- huh?!?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 29, 2010, 23:12 UTC
Message-ID: <7vk4v0fqts.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <ron1-0EE62E.14474929012010@news.gmane.org>

Ron Garret <ron1@flownet.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> My actual use case is very complicated, but here's a simplified version:
>
> Suppose I'm using git as a back-end for a wiki.  I want to look at the 
> state of the entire wiki as it was in some point in the past, and I also 
> want to be able to look at the diffs between individual pages as they 
> were then and as they are now.

Don't think you are so special ;-) "git checkout $that_old_commit" was invented _exactly_ for that use case. You can look around from that state, and when you are done sightseeing, you can come back by doing a "git checkout master" (or whichever branch you want to be on).

You don't necessarily have to check out an old state if the only thing you are interested in is to review how the contents changed over time. Use "git log -p" (from the current tip) for that.

If you chose to have an old checkout and then traverse the changes over time leading to the current tip, you would say "git log -p ..master" instead.