Re: Effectively navigating branch history

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 31, 2011, 18:40 UTC
Message-ID: <7vtycaiuh9.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <18203023.45200.1306866084905.JavaMail.root@mail.hq.genarts.com>

Stephen Bash <bash@genarts.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

>> Yeah, I think it was 1f9a980636 which was a merge between fb674d7 and
>> 73546c0. I just compared the output between these two:
>> 
>> $ git diff fb674d7...73546c0 -- config.c ;# what the topic did
>> $ git diff fb674d7 1f9a980 -- config.c ;# what was merged
>
> I often find myself wanting to do the "what the topic did" operation but
> once the branch is merged and deleted, I have difficulty finding useful
> SHAs to diff.
>
> So in an attempt to educate myself, I tried to track down fb674d7 and
> 1f9a980 (and failed miserably).

I just did

    $ git log --first-parent master -- config.c

which was sufficient for my workflow as most of the commits on master are merges from topics and I can see what each topic did from the merge commit summary message.

If I were doing this on a codebase I am not very familiar with, I probably I would have first narrowed things down a bit by

    $ git grep -n -e NOGLOBAL -- config.c ;# to learn the line number 830
    $ git blame -L825,835 -- config.c

to learn where the offending NOGLOBAL came from (it is from ab88c363) so that I can say

    $ git log -m -p -GNOGLOBAL ab88c363.. -- config.c

to find that 1f9a980 reintroduced it by mistake.