git branch: multiple --merged and --no-merged options?

I find myself frequently running commands like this

  $ comm -12 <(git branch --no-merged master) <(git branch --merged next)

when checking for graduation candidates. Of course I first tried

  $ git branch --no-merged master --merged next

but this is equivalent to

  $ git branch --merged next

Isn't this query common enough to have a nicer interface? What do other people use?

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 02:38:12PM -0500, Jed Brown wrote:

That's a reasonable thing to want to do.

Yeah, sadly that does not work, as we use the same slot for the flag and store only one of the two (and we also allow only one "--merged" head, even though you could in theory want to know "merged to X, or merged to Y"). I do not think there is a reason we could handle both. I think we could even do it with a single traversal, but even with two traversals, doing both in-process will be faster (because we only have to pull the commits from disk once).

So I think it is something that ought to work, but it will need some code written. Patches welcome. ;)

-Peff

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Hmm, I would have said conjunction (AND) was more natural than disjunction (OR). If we add support for multiple '--merged' and '--no-merged', do we expect to eventually have a full query grammar?

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 09:46:42PM -0500, Jed Brown wrote:

Yeah, you might want either. I was just thinking along the lines of the existing --contains and --points-at (which only tag, not branch, knows about), both of which OR multiple items. I think you'd want to flesh out some use cases before deciding.

-Peff