Re: branch management

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2009, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Jun 2009, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> 
> > Harry Duin <hduin@optionshouse.com> writes:
> > 
> > > 2. show list of files/directories touched by a branch (useful when
> > >    looking for past fixes, but are unsure where the fix was done)
> > 
> > If you can use pickaxe search (git log -S...), or git-blame, or just
> > looking throught "git log ... -- <path>", you can use
> > 
> > $ git rev-list master..branch | 
> >   git diff-tree --stdin -r --name-only |
> >   sort -u
> 
> What I use in that case is simply
> 
> 	git diff --stat master...branch

No, that's not going to work in general. The "master...branch" thing works 
most of the time, but there isn't always a single merge-point, and in the 
case of criss-cross merges, you'll get it wrong.

It will also hide changes that got reverted (or undone some other way), 
which can be relevant.

That said, the "git rev-list | git diff-tree" thing has a new name. We 
call it "git log". 

So what Jakub wrote can generally be written as

	git log --name-only --pretty=format:'' master..branch | sort -u

if you're willing to accept the empty line from all the suppressed commit 
messages (with that "git diff-tree" he'll see all the commit numbers, 
though, so I guess the 'git log' thing is still better)

			Linus