Re: git-feed-mail-list.sh

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

But if you want to get it for any random merges, you can always just do

	git log -11 --pretty=oneline ^$commit^ $commit^@ |
		sed 's/[0-9a-f]* // ; 11 s/.*/\.\.\./' 

which will show up to the ten first commits that were merged (and turn the 
eleventh one, if it exists, into "..." - that's a pretty disgusting trick 
to make it show when you left things out).

That "^$commit^ $commit^@" part is important. It may look like some 
deranged git smiley, but it does exactly what you want it to do: take all 
the parents of the commit, but ignore any commit reachable from the first 
one (the "mainline" of the person who did the commit).

The ^@ syntax is obviously pretty new, so it requires a modern git.

It is indeed very quite new.  Merged into "master" branch at the
beginning of this month.

I often wish we had a straightforward way to tell when a given
feature went into the mainline, not just appeared on a topic
branch.  In this case, I said:

	$ git whatchanged -p -S'"^@"' master -- revision.c

to find ea4a19 commit (Apr 30 00:54:29 2006 -0700).  But that
was when the feature was first made on one of my topic branches,
which is not what I was looking for.

By looking at gitk, I can then tell 83262e (May 1 01:54:27)
merged it to "next", and 746437 (May 1 22:55:40) merged it to
"master".

In general this is an unsolvable question, because I can have a
topic branch forked off of the tip of "master", cook it for a
few days without advancing "master" at all, and merge it to
"master" after that.  But such a merge will be a fast-forward.