Question

I’m comparing remote branches, in order to see if a branch can safely be merged into Master, in order for Master to be released.

I’m doing the following:

git diff --name-status origin/develbranch ... origin/master

And I seem to get a correct list of files, like this:

AAAA    www/images/widget/topdown/right_dis.png
DDDD    www/includes/htmlpurifier/library/HTMLPurifier/DefinitionCache/Decorator.php

My questions are:

1. Am I doing this correctly?
2. If I merge these branches, the DDDD file won’t be deleted in Master right?

Answer 1

Actually, to get the diff the right way around you want to run

git diff --name-status origin/master ... origin/develbranch

That should work fine, but I’ll show you some other nifty tricks:

1. git checkout master; git branch --no-merged

   This will show all branches that aren’t fast-forwardable to master, i.e. all non-merged branches.

2. git checkout master; git merge --no-ff --no-commit develbranch; git diff

   This is the only way of knowing what the merge would actually look like. You can throw away the merge after you’ve looked at it with git reset --hard .

3. git branch --contains develbranch

   Will show all the branches that develbranch could be fast-forwarded to. This is useful for checking which branches all the changes of develbranch have been merged to.