A couple of minor branching questions

Alan· Feb 24, 2009, 00:38 UTC · lore

Is there an easy way to tell what commit a branch is branched off from? Also, it there a way to tell what branch the branch is branched off from?

I know I can use gitk to give a visual diagram, but I want something I can feed into a program.

Thanks!

Jakub Narebski· Feb 24, 2009, 01:29 UTC · re: Alan · lore

Re: A couple of minor branching questions

Alan <alan@clueserver.org> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Is there an easy way to tell what commit a branch is branched off from?
> Also, it there a way to tell what branch the branch is branched off
> from? 
> 
> I know I can use gitk to give a visual diagram, but I want something I
> can feed into a program.

First you can check branch.<branchname>.merge configuration option (with git-config) to check what branch (by _remote_ name) given branch is based on.

Second, you can use "git merge-base <branchname> <second branch>" to find common ancestor, i.e. branching point of two branches. By the way, there is shortcut a..b and a...b for revision ranges: see documentation in git-rev-parse (or was it git-rev-list?).

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git