Re: How to find where a branch was taken from.

Paul Gardiner [off-list ref] writes:

I need a command that will find the remote branch from which
the currently checked out branch was started. I don't know
git very well, and the only way I can think to do it so far
is to iterate over the remote branches and find the one
for which git-rev-list <branch>..HEAD gives the smallest
number of objects. I'm guessing there must be a better
way. Any ideas?

There will be _no_ way.  It is simply impossible.

    $ git checkout -b my-new-branch origin/somerandombranch~27^2^2~23

is a perfectly valid way to create a new branch.

You would probably want to re-think in a bigger picture, _why_
you would want to find such information, in other words, how you would
want to use the information (if such a thing were possible) to solve
_what_ problem.  That true problem you did not mention (and assumed that
"the remote branch the branch was branched from" would be a good tool to
solve it) might have a better solution.