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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T23:24:35+00:00

My git repository has three branches, devel , stable and customers/acme_patches . A long

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My git repository has three branches, devel, stable and customers/acme_patches. A long time ago, stable was forked from devel, and all the bugfixing takes place in stable. Every now and then, stable is merged back into devel. customers/acme_patches is a branch with a few customer-specific patches. The branch wasn’t merged into either of devel and stable.

A bit of ASCII art to illustrate the scenario:

            o---o---o          customers/acme_patches?
           /
  o---o---1---o---o---o        stable
 /     \           \
o---o---o---2---o---o---o---o  devel
             \
              o---o---o        customers/acme_patches?

Now I wonder:

What branch was customers/acme_patches forked from – devel or stable? I only know that it was forked off one of them in the past, but I don’t know which. E.g. it might have been commit 1 or 2 in the above diagram.

I’ve been playing around with git log --oneline --graph and gitk but since customers/acme_patches was forked a few hundred commits ago, it’s hard to follow the lines being drawn.

Is there maybe a quick command (a little script is fine, too) which can somehow follow the commits in customers/acme_patches backwards to find the first commit with two children (the fork point) and then determines whether that commit was done in stable or in devel?

In the best case, I could just execute something like (excuse the prompt, I’m on Windows):

C:\src> git fork-origin customers/acme_patches
stable
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well, there is probably no perfect solution to this answer. I mean there is no fork-origin equivalent in git (to my knowledge).
    Because the stable branch is merged into devel, your acme_patches (from 1) is on both devel and stable branch.

    What you could possibly do is:

    git branch --contains $(git merge-base customers/acme_patches devel stable)

    If you have stable and not devel, or devel and not stable, then you know where it comes from.

    For example, in the case 2, you would have

    $ git branch --contains $(git merge-base customers/acme_patches devel stable)
customers/acme_patches
devel

    while in case 1 you would have 

    $ git branch --contains $(git merge-base customers/acme_patches devel stable)
customers/acme_patches
devel
stable

    As it’s now on both branches (because of the merge from stable to dev)

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