Re: Have git-merge-base support multiple IDs

Jan Engelhardt venit, vidit, dixit 03.08.2009 15:39:

On Friday 2009-07-31 18:22, Michael J Gruber wrote:

quoted

Jan Engelhardt venit, vidit, dixit 31.07.2009 17:51:

quoted

To determine the rebase point (i.e. first commit in a series),
one can (ab)use git-merge-base:

  p=$(git merge-base ab80794f faae2553)
  git re -i ${p}^

The twist is that merge-base in git 1.6.3.3 happens to ignore any 
further arguments following two IDs. In short:

  git merge-base A B C...

Only yields the merge-base of A and B, and ignores C...

Uhm, are you sure about this?
The first argument is special. merge-base computes the merge base between two commits:
- the first argument
- a (hypothetical) merge between all other arguments.
It may look a if C was ignored, though.

Hm indeed. Is there a better way to find the common ancestor of commits?

I haven't tested thorougly, but at least for the standard example

git show-branch --merge-base A B C

seems to do what you want. Note that for this command, the order of
arguments is irrelevant, whereas for git merge-base it makes a huge
difference. Also, git show-branch documentation is a bit outdated. I
expect to look into this...

Michael