Question

I have two branches devel and next. In devel I have a more or less huge amount of commits. Some of the commits are cherry picked in next. Also I added some commits to next which are merged to devel.

Now I would like to see what is missing in next, so I can test the changes in detail before bringing them to next. My question is now, how can I see which commits are in devel but not in next?

Answer 1

The little-used command git cherry (docs) shows you the commits which haven’t yet been cherry-picked.

In short:

git cherry <feature-branch> [base-branch]

# Checkout the base branch
git checkout main

# Diff against the target branch
git cherry -v next

# Diff against the target branch, without switching
git cherry -v next main

Example output:

+ 492508acab7b454eee8b805f8ba906056eede0ff feat: make bazzable
- 5ceb5a9077ddb9e78b1e8f24bfc70e674c627949 hotfix: off-by-one
+ b4459544c000f4d51d1ec23f279d9cdb19c1d32b feat: add bar
+ b6ce3b78e938644a293b2dd2a15b2fecb1b54cd9 feat: add foo

+ means the commit is only in next, but not in main
- means the commit has an equivalent in both branches

Remove the -v if you want the commits without the subject line:

+ 492508acab7b454eee8b805f8ba906056eede0ff
- 5ceb5a9077ddb9e78b1e8f24bfc70e674c627949
+ b4459544c000f4d51d1ec23f279d9cdb19c1d32b
+ b6ce3b78e938644a293b2dd2a15b2fecb1b54cd9