git commits on a specific branch

Question

I'm looking for the commits of a specific branch. My tree looks as follows:

feature/X     C--E--F
             /       \
master  -A--B--D---G--H--I--J->

How to get the commits C,E and F? What I tried is:

git rev-list feature/X ^master

but this gives no commits. I assume in that special case the problem is the back merge of feature/X to the master. That's why the commits C, E and F are accessible from master too, isn't it? So - how to handle that situation, Any ideas?

Regards Thomas

Answer 1

Generally speaking, once it's merged, the details of which branch the commit came from is lost. All you have is that the commits are covered by the current branch.

However, I can sort of find a way like so. First, you find where the merge took place. This can be done using a git log --merges -1 to find the nearest merge to master (in your case, H) . The featureX branch I assume is right behind this at F. This commit has 2 parents. Since featureX was merged into master, you can get the target branch parent using H^.

Then, you can find the difference between H^ and F like so, git log H^..featureX which should give you all the commits reachable from featureX and omits those reachable from H^ ie. C, E and F.

As an example, here is a repo.

If done, right, I should get all the "Update X" commits.

First, we get the merge commit.

% git log --merges -1 --oneline
e8928b9 Merge branch 'X'

Then we get the log in question. The feature branch is called X in my repo.

% git log e8928\^..X --oneline
92a1f58 Updates x 10
f56306d Updates x 9
54d2253 Updates x 8
a8ba58b Updates x 7
10d08c5 Updates x 6
625d267 Updates x 5
96671d4 Updates x 4
5031498 Updates x 3
41770ea Updates x 2
442033b Updates x 1

This is, at best, hackish. I'd be very interested in finding a genuine solution.