Re: Find the starting point of a local branch

On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 06:16:05PM +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

quoted

The reason that git does not bother storing "where did I start this
branch" is that it is usually not useful. The right question is usually
"what is the merge base". There are exceptions, of course (e.g., if you
are asking something like "what work did I do while checked out on the
'foo' branch"). But for merging and rebasing, I think the computed
merge-base is much more likely to do what people want.

Rebasing is exactly why I want this. Merge base works most of the time
until you rewrite upstream (which I do sometimes).

True, although wouldn't you generally want to rebase it on top of the
rewritten upstream in that case (which is what "pull --rebase" will do,
by scanning the reflog for the last version of the upstream that you
actually built on).

There are also cases when I create a branch without upstream, or when
upstream is renamed. Still, making "rebase -i --topic" == "rebase -i
$(git merge-base HEAD @{upstream})" would be cool.

Yeah. I usually just do "rebase -i @{upstream}" which picks the same
commits, but moves to the updated version of upstream (IOW, I both
rewrite and move forward at the same time). But there is value in
rewriting without moving forward in many workflows. That seems like a
sensible feature to me.

-Peff