Subject: Re: A couple of minor branching questions

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:29:10 -0800 (PST)

Alan <[email-masked]> writes:

> Is there an easy way to tell what commit a branch is branched off from?
> Also, it there a way to tell what branch the branch is branched off
> from? 
> 
> I know I can use gitk to give a visual diagram, but I want something I
> can feed into a program.

First you can check branch.<branchname>.merge configuration option
(with git-config) to check what branch (by _remote_ name) given branch
is based on.

Second, you can use "git merge-base <branchname> <second branch>" to
find common ancestor, i.e. branching point of two branches. By the
way, there is shortcut a..b and a...b for revision ranges: see
documentation in git-rev-parse (or was it git-rev-list?).

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git