Re: Listing of branch creation time?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mar 28, 2007, 01:06 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0703271759510.6730@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070327233552.GA7186@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Jeff King wrote:

>
> You have to look at the latest merge-base, but that tells you the last 
> time you merged with master, not necessarily the first time.

Well, if you know which branch it is a branch off of, don't use merge-base, just do

	git log --reverse -1 origin..branch

which should pick up the first commit that is on that branch but haven't been merged back to the original branch.

The merge-base is the right thing to do for *merging*, but if you keep merging into the branch you are developing on (to keep up-to-date), the above "what is on the branch but not in the origin" is definitely the right thing to do.

Of course, people already pointed out "gitk". And I agree. Quite often, it's worth the full graphical output to do

	gitk origin..branch

to see the big picture. But if you want to work on the command line, the above "git log" command line isn't really that bad to type..

(Personally, if I didn't want the graphical version, I'd likely just do

	git log origin..branch

and then do '>' in the pager to get to the bottom. That way I can then scroll up and down if I decide I want to get a bigger picture)

		Linus