Hi Antoine, On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 4:34 PM Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > https://stackoverflow.com/a/71193866/1174784 > > There are currently a whopping twenty-five answers to that question in > that thread, and I'm hoping the community here will have a more > definitive answer to this question. I have picked the answer that uses > the least possible external commands, but it still uses a `tail -1` > which I'm somewhat unhappy about. I have thought of using > `--max-count` for this instead, but I understand that probably does > the equivalent of a `head -n` *and* it's applied before `--reverse`, > so there's not other way to do this. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to answer that question a decade ago, and my conclusion after trying every possible combination is that it's simply not possible. Every solution at the end of the day will be a hack that can be broken with a corner case. It has already been discussed in this mailing list [1], and nobody found a solution. That's why I wrote a patch to implement a branch@{tail} helper to show an auxiliary ref to the beginning of the branch. I don't think I ever sent it to the mailing list, as my patches are rarely merged, but I'm sure I have it somewhere. The other solution I thought of was adding an update-branch hook that could be run every time a branch is updated, and then the hook would update the branch tail reference [2]. As expected, that patch wasn't merged either. It's interesting how we keep coming back to the same problems; right now there's a discussion in the git-users mailing list precisely about the same topic: how to find the branch point, in particular so `git name-rev` shows the correct branch a commit belongs to (which is otherwise just a bad guess). FWIW my motivation at the time was to prove Mercurial users wrong regarding features that they have and Git doesn't, I contended that Mercurial named branches (aka commit labels) were not necessary, and everything they achieved could be achieved in Git through different means. That turned out to be untrue, as there is one thing Mercurial can do that Git can't: show the precise point a branch started from. I abandoned my efforts back then, but the topic seems inescapable, as that is also needed by new tools like `git range-diff`, so in my own tool to keep track of patch series (`git send-series`[2])I end up creating a ton of refs just to properly keep track of the branch points of my different patch series. If only Git developers acknowledged the current very real limitation, something could be done about it. Cheers. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAMP44s0f7AJPQSTDgvy0U7vx8nxzq2a3vMhSr2Tcc61fetFkJA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/1398047016-21643-1-git-send-email-felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx/ [3] https://github.com/felipec/git-send-series -- Felipe Contreras
