Find the next tag on a given branch

Dear list,

I want to find the next tag (the tag following a commit), but require that it lie on a given branch. Alternatively, a filter pattern might work too.

My challenge is to answer the question:

  "Which is the first Debian release including a given commit"

The way Debian packages are (mostly) maintained in Git is that there are at least an upstream and a Debian branch (usually "master"). master branched off upstream, and upstream is merged into master at regular intervals. Whenever a Debian release is made, the corresponding branch is tagged.

If I run

  git describe --contains mycommitish

it prints the next tag, which is usually upstream's tag, which is not quite what I want (it's usually enough for me to figure it out, but this is Git and so I should be able to do even better! ;\) )

I would like to have it continue the search until it reaches the master branch. For instance, a command like

  git describe --contains mycommit --on-branch master

would basically search into the future (breadth-first?) until it landed on the specified branch, and then continue the normal search routine (and find the commit on another branch actually, the important point is that it only started to search for tags once it reached the specified branch).

The alternative is

  git describe --contains mycommit --pattern='debian/*'

which would keep searching for tags until it found a tag/ref-name that matched the specified glob.

Is this already possible somehow? Am I simply looking at the wrong tools?

Thanks,

martin f krafft wrote:

Maybe

  git tag --contains mycommit | grep ^debian/

?

also sprach Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> [2010.09.09.1007 +0200]:

Awesome. Thank you so much!

On 09/09/10 07:28, martin f krafft wrote:

It's not that simple, as 'mycommit', once merged, /is/ technically part of master.

If 'upstream' contains just imports, ie has no merges whatsoever, like eg git://git.debian.org/collab-maint/batmand.git, you could use something like this:

$ git rev-list --ancestry-path --merges mycommit..master | xargs -n1 git describe --contains

(this doesn't catch the very first initial import (and release tag),
 but that case isn't very interesting anyway)

With a more complicated history, with many merges, you'd have to do something more like

1) git rev-list --ancestry-path --merges mycommit..master
2) filter out all the merge ids from this list that are reachable from
   'upstream'
3) git describe --contains 

Easily scriptable, but i don't see a way to express the 2nd step in pure git-speak right now. [1] Is there a way?

Or you could just extend 'git describe --contains' to take another optional ref, check if the object pointed to by the tag that it finds is reachable from that ref, and skip this tag if yes. Then you could do `git describe --contains mycommit --skip upstream`. ;)

artur

[1] iff i got it right. Consider history such as:
               
         ...-> c
                \    
upstream -> C -> m -> c ----> ... ---> c ---> upstream
                       \                \
master   -------------> M -> m -> ... -> m -> master
                            /
         ... ------------> c

Asking for a released 'C' must result in 'M'. (Merging 'master' into 'upstream' must not happen, obviously)