Re: Effectively navigating branch history

[Stephen Bash <bash@genarts.com>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 2:40:50 PM
> Subject: Re: Effectively navigating branch history
> 
> >> Yeah, I think it was 1f9a980636 which was a merge between fb674d7
> >> and 73546c0. I just compared the output between these two:
> >>
> >> $ git diff fb674d7...73546c0 -- config.c ;# what the topic did
> >> $ git diff fb674d7 1f9a980 -- config.c ;# what was merged
> >
> > I often find myself wanting to do the "what the topic did" operation
> > but once the branch is merged and deleted, I have difficulty finding
> > useful SHAs to diff.
> >
> > So in an attempt to educate myself, I tried to track down fb674d7
> > and 1f9a980 (and failed miserably).
> 
> I just did
> 
> $ git log --first-parent master -- config.c
> 
> which was sufficient for my workflow as most of the commits on master
> are merges from topics and I can see what each topic did from the merge
> commit summary message.

Ah, if only our workflow made it that easy... unfortunately it does not ;)

> If I were doing this on a codebase I am not very familiar with, I
> probably I would have first narrowed things down a bit by
> 
> $ git grep -n -e NOGLOBAL -- config.c ;# to learn the line number 830
> $ git blame -L825,835 -- config.c
> 
> to learn where the offending NOGLOBAL came from (it is from ab88c363)
> so that I can say
> 
> $ git log -m -p -GNOGLOBAL ab88c363.. -- config.c
> 
> to find that 1f9a980 reintroduced it by mistake.

Ah, I was missing the -m!  At one point I realized pickaxe was only showing me non-merge commits and skimmed the log manpage to see if there was an option that would enable it but apparently missed -m.

Thanks!

Stephen