From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:15:48 GMT
Subject: Re: How to find where a branch was taken from.
Message-ID: <7vzlssphdn.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v4pb0qw28.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Paul Gardiner <osronline@glidos.net> writes:
>
>> I need a command that will find the remote branch from which
>> the currently checked out branch was started. I don't know
>> git very well, and the only way I can think to do it so far
>> is to iterate over the remote branches and find the one
>> for which git-rev-list <branch>..HEAD gives the smallest
>> number of objects. I'm guessing there must be a better
>> way. Any ideas?
>
> There will be _no_ way.  It is simply impossible.
>
>     $ git checkout -b my-new-branch origin/somerandombranch~27^2^2~23
>
> is a perfectly valid way to create a new branch.
>
> You would probably want to re-think in a bigger picture, _why_
> you would want to find such information, in other words, how you would
> want to use the information (if such a thing were possible) to solve
> _what_ problem.  That true problem you did not mention (and assumed that
> "the remote branch the branch was branched from" would be a good tool to
> solve it) might have a better solution.

Having said that, have you tried:

	$ git reflog show that_local_branch

and looked for "branch: Created from blah"?