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

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Charles Bailey [off-list ref] wrote:

 > In order to do this, however, I'm forced to remember where I got my
 > "original" version from, which isn't even that important.  As the
 > developer of a particular patch, all I *really* should have to know
 > is: a) here are the things I added since I made my topic branch, and
 > b) here is the branch I want to rebase them onto so I can submit my
 > cleaned patches upstream.

 Why are you forced to remember?

 If you don't want to transplant the patches onto where the remote
 branch is now, then you just need to pick a commit on your current
 branch that is before any commit that you want to reorder/recombine
 and do a git rebase -i <sha1>. (It should be easy to pick a commit
 from git log. Perhaps it's the first one with and author that isn't
 you.  [...]

All these things work, but they're unnecessarily tedious manual
remembering.  If I have a lot of topic branches on the go at once,
things start getting a little messy and it's hard to remember which
patches came from where, particularly if I'm aggregating, reviewing,
and cleaning up patches from several people at work before sending
them upstream (in which case I don't always recognize the checkin
messages presented in git-rebase -i).

svn has "svn log --stop-on-copy", which is useful in exactly this
situation.  A git branch is not really a "copy", of course, so the
actual implementation can't be the same.

"git show-branch" has logic very close to what we need here: if you
give it the names of your current branch and its parent, it'll show
you just the changes on both branches since the branchpoint.  But I
don't really want to know about additional changes on the parent, only
on the branch I'm working with, and I often prefer the output to be in
git-log's (very flexible) format instead of git-show-branch.

Have fun,

Avery