Re: Find out on which branch a commit was originally made) (was ANNOUNCE git-what-branch)

[Stephen Bash <bash@genarts.com>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Seth Robertson" <in-gitvger@baka.org>
> To: "Artur Skawina" <art.08.09@gmail.com>
> Cc: "Stefan Haller" <lists@haller-berlin.de>, git@vger.kernel.org
> Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2010 7:26:19 PM
> Subject: Re: Find out on which branch a commit was originally made) (was ANNOUNCE git-what-branch)
>
> ... I wanted something completely different. Something more
> like: if a bug was introduced in commit X, what releases or branches
> has it contaminated (or more positively, if a feature was introduced,
> where was it made available). The simple case is figuring out on
> which branch a commit was originally made.

Wait... When you restate the problem that way, isn't git-{branch,tag} --contains the right answer?  I'm curious how you (and others) would differentiate the approaches...

If I were to frame this discussion, I think the value of git-what-branch is the ability to extract the branch name that a commit was created on.  In many environments the branch name may be useless (see the i18n example earlier in this discussion), but at least in our corporate environment, branches (especially those that are going to merge into mainline development) are named very consistently.  So in our situation the branch name can produce information that may not be captured in the standard reporting products (branch names transform into conventional tag names, branch names imply a lead developer, branch names spur developers' memories, ...).

Stephen