How do I get a squashed diff for review

Hi,

I'm wondering if there is an easy way to get a squashed diff of the changes done on the feature branch for review. In the simple cases (where feature branch is linear) there is an absolutely fantastic way to get a patch for review: git diff master...feature

However if the feature branch happened to be long-lived and had mainline merged into it it's not going to work -- the resulting diff would contain changes from the merge. The way we are doing things now is to merge master into it once more and then diff, however this is somewhat cumbersome. Is there easier way to do it?

And while we are on the topic -- is there a tool for git similar to "bzr qdiff"? It's a simple graphical diff viewer with 2 nice features -- it shows complete diff (of multiple files) in a single window and has a checkbox to switch between diff-only & full-text modes. I have seen difftool, but it seems to work on per-file basis, and something like "vi <(git diff ...)" lacks the easy way to switch into full-text mode.

--
Best regards,
  Alexander.

On Fri, Nov 04, 2011 at 07:15:01PM +0000, Alexander Usov wrote:

"git diff A...B" is equivalent to "git diff <merge-base A B> B". The merge-base can be found with "git merge-base A B" and is simply the common ancestor of A and B.

Diffing against the merge base (which doesn't contain the merged work done in master) is why you're seeing the merges in the diff.

It sounds like you want the simpler form of "diff" which doesn't do any merge-base calculation.

e.g. "git diff A B" and its synonymn "git diff A..B".

difftool is a wrapper around specialized diff tools, so the ability to switch from diff to full view is tool-dependent.

A contrib "git-dirdiff" script was posted to the list recently. It builds upon diff tools that can diff directory trees.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/184528

There may be a newer version of this script, too. Roland would know for sure...

On 5 November 2011 09:15, David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> wrote:

Just diffing 2 revisions (or trees) won't do the trick. Let me try to explain what I'm trying to achieve.

Consider the following history:

master: A---B---D---F
            \    \
branch:      .-C--E--G

Now I want to review the changes made in the branch prior to merging it. What I essentially want to be included in the diff are changes committed in C & G and conflic resolution done in E (if any).

There are few ways that I know of to achieve it:
- use "git log -p branch ^master " to get a sequence of patches and try to
feed them into combinediff tool (part of the diffutils package). This
will require
some scripting and I'm not really sure if combinediff would work with
git patches.

- "git diff D..branch" would do a trick, but I'm not sure how to
correctly determine
D (if I'm to write a script). This would be the last (in topological
order) commit which is
reachable from both master & branch. Any suggestions on it?

Thanks. Will have a more carefull look at various tools & see if I can figure something out.

Alexander Usov <a.s.usov@gmail.com> writes:

D is the merge-base between F and G. So "git diff $(git merge-base F G) G" would compare D and G.

Modern git lets you write it as "git diff F...G" as this is a fairly useful short-hand.

On 5 November 2011 23:53, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Strange. I definitely remember reading about "git diff F...G" and trying it out. And somehow the result wasn't really correct -- as if commit B was chosen to be merge-base. I can't reproduce it right now on a sample repo -- will try it once more back in the office.

Thanks for help.