On 09/22/10 18:35, Seth Robertson wrote: > looking at just one branch, it is looking at 150+ branches. If you > use --reference-branch to specify the one branch you are looking at, > it takes a much more reasonable 15-20 seconds. Likewise if you select This started in a thread about locating dead topic branches, but what you want is something slightly different, hence the confusion. AFAIUI it now, your case is basically this: you have several independently developed topic (or side-) branches, which are periodically merged into a master branch, the side branches themselves are also merging 'master' to receive changes happening elsewhere. So the graph could look like this: m-> m -> m -> m -> m -> m -> m -> master \ \ / / b -> b -> b -> b -> b -> b -> side-branch#1 Ditto for the other n side-branches. What you're asking for is: given commit C and a list of several side branches, tell me where (ie on which branch) this commit originated. Two things make the above trivial history a bit more complicated. A) one side-branch can merge another, and build on top of changes that are not yet available on 'master'; the result can then appear in master via either one or both paths. This is why showing when and how a change became visible on every side branch can be interesting. B) when a side branch does not contain any new changes, but is made uptodate wrt master, the resulting history could end up like this: m-> m -> m -> m -> m -> m -> m -> master \ / \ / b -> b -> b c -> c -> side-branch#1 What happened was -- git "optimized" the simple merge away, turning it into a fast-forward, saving one merge commit, but loosing the link connecting the 'c' and 'b' parts of 'side-branch#1'. Do you (anybody) happen to know a public repo, w/ history as above, ie w/ more then one long-lived branch that has seen some fast-forwards? I wonder how reliable recovering the missing link would be... And there's no reason why this operation should take ~20 minutes, even for the randomly chosen, but real, worst case. But finding a good repo to test w/ would take longer than writing the code... artur -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html