How to find native/original commits of a branch?

Question

There are two branches master and A. I know that some work has been done in the branch A a long time ago. Whoever was working on that branch, merged the master branch into the branch A, then merged the branch A to the master. All the branched are in remote. Now how i can find the commits that originally come from branch A?

N.B I am not looking for the branch name of certain commit. Rather I have the branch name and I am looking for the commits, so please don't mark it duplicate with this or other similar question

In Git before 2.36, this is pretty hard to do well in general. The new feature in 2.36 makes it easy *if* whoever built the branch obeyed some simple (easy to obey) rules, but without that Git version, your best bet is probably just to run `git log --graph` and try to follow the original branch's commits "by hand". — torek, Jun 22 '22 at 09:41

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 22 '22 at 05:56

2

As described in "Finding a branch point with Git?", that should be possible with Git 2.36 (Q2 2022):

(branch_A_tag)
     |
--X--A--B--C--D--F  (master) 
      \   / \   /
       \ /   \ /
        G--H--I--J  (branch A)

vonc@vclp MINGW64 ~/git/tests/branchOrigin (branch_A)
git rev-list --exclude-first-parent-only ^master branch_A

That will give you J -- I -- H -- G, which are the commits that originally come from branch A.

answered Jun 22 '22 at 05:56

VonC

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I have checked out to a new branch branch_A but getting this output https://i.imgur.com/2UhRBDS.png – mahfuj asif Jun 22 '22 at 07:15
@mahfujasif What version of Git are you using? This option is only available with the recent 2.36. – VonC Jun 22 '22 at 07:33
Sorry i missed the version. My git version is bellow 2.36 and facing hard time updating – mahfuj asif Jun 22 '22 at 09:12
@mahfujasif On which OS are you? Windows, Linux, Mac? – VonC Jun 22 '22 at 10:10

How to find native/original commits of a branch?

1 Answers1