Re: Find the starting point of a local branch

On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Seth Robertson [off-list ref] wrote:

In message <20121224035825.GA17203@zuhnb712>, Woody Wu writes:

    How can I find out what's the staring reference point (a commit number
    or tag name) of a locally created branch? I can use gitk to find out it
    but this method is slow, I think there might be a command line to do it
    quickly.

The answer is more complex than you probably suspected.

Technically, `git log --oneline mybranch | tail -n 1` will tell you
the starting point of any branch.  But...I'm sure that isn't what you
want to know.

You want to know "what commit was I at when I typed `git branch
mybranch`"?  The problem is git doesn't record this information and
doesn't have the slightest clue.

Maybe we should store this information. reflog is a perfect place for
this, I think. If this information is reliably available, git rebase
can be told to "rebase my whole branch" instead of my choosing the
base commit for it.
-- 
Duy