Question

I am writing an automated system to list commits between two commit references. Say I have 3 commits in chronological order such as:

• A
• B
• C

and I do git log --pretty=oneline A..C, I get the log as expected. However if I reverse the arguments, for example git log --pretty=oneline C..A, I get nothing. Is there no way git can be clever about the commit references?

If not, is there a way to determine if ref C should be after A in the argument list automatically?

Answer 1

You can run

git merge-base A C

• if it returns A, then you sould call git log A..C
• if it returns C, then you sould call git log C..A
• if it returns something else, A and C are on different branches and merge-base returned their common ancestor