Steven Rostedt [off-list ref] writes:

On Tue, 2012-05-01 at 20:49 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

When a normal developer wants to _reset to_ a particular tagged release,...

The problem is,...
But then I would end up with ...

[comments on the part I declared "uninteresting" snipped]

quoted

So the case to "reset to" is not very interesting.

quoted

But when a normal developer wants to _sync to_ a particular tagged
release, in order to _continue_ working on her topic, she would need to
have a merge (unless she does not have _anything_ herself), and at that
point, merging v3.4-rc5 vs v3.4-rc5^0 would not make that much of a
difference.  If she absolutely detests the "mergetag" header, she could do
a "git fetch --tags linus" followed by

	git merge v3.4-rc5^0

which admittedly is two more letters than she used to type.

This would fit into my workflow. Thus I could use this.

OK.

quoted

If you mean by "Ideas" for additional features, obviously the last step
could be enhanced to use a more intuitive command line that requires the
user to type even more, i.e.

	git merge --ff v3.4-rc5

Once that is done, "git pull --ff linus v3.4-rc5" would fall out as a
logical consequence.

But obviously these two would need new code ;-)

The -ff would make sense as it seems to be the logical thing a user
would want. If they specify the fast-forward flag, then the user would
expect the merge to be a fast forward if possible.

OK.  Sounds like a good janitor project we could try to find a volunteer
on ;-).

BTW, is there a git compare type option. That is, I like to compare two
separate branches with the result that one currently gets with git when
a branch is following another branch. When you check out that branch, it
gives you an update on how those two branches are related (is one a fast
forward of the other, are they off by different commits?). It would be
nice if git could do this with any two branches. I wrote a script to do
this for me (attached) but it would be nice if git had it natively.

$ git-branch-status v3.0.4 v3.0.5              
Branch v3.0.4 can be fast forward to v3.0.5 in 240 commits

$ git-branch-status v3.0.4 v3.1  
Branch v3.0.4 and v3.1
differ by 257 and 9380 commit(s) respectively

I personally do not think "257 and 9380" vs "15 and 400" totally
uninteresting, in the sense that the absolute numbers do not matter much,
and the only question that matter is "Is everything in this one included
in the other?" and I just say "git lgf master..topic" (where I have in my
$HOME/.gitconfig "[alias] lgf = log --oneline --boundary --first-parent"
defined) to see the list of commits on a topic, with the indication of
where the topic forked from.  Obviously it takes the "never merge mainline
into topics" discipline for it to be useful.

I also use "git show-branch $A $B $C..." for something like this but that
is only useful when these branches are known to have only a handful of
commits on their own, and its output is not very suited if they have
hundreds of commits.