git-cherry: Find commits yet to be applied to upstream

DESCRIPTION

Determine whether there are commits in <head>..<upstream> that are equivalent to those in the range <limit>..<head>.

The equivalence test is based on the diff, after removing whitespace and line numbers. git-cherry therefore detects when commits have been "copied" by means of git-cherry-pick(1), git-am(1) or git-rebase(1).

Outputs the SHA1 of every commit in <limit>..<head>, prefixed with - for commits that have an equivalent in <upstream>, and + for commits that do not.

OPTIONS

-v

Show the commit subjects next to the SHA1s.

Upstream branch to search for equivalent commits. Defaults to the upstream branch of HEAD.

<head>

Working branch; defaults to HEAD.

<limit>

Do not report commits up to (and including) limit.

EXAMPLES

Patch workflows

git-cherry is frequently used in patch-based workflows (see gitworkflows(7)) to determine if a series of patches has been applied by the upstream maintainer. In such a workflow you might create and send a topic branch like this:

$ git checkout -b topic origin/master
# work and create some commits
$ git format-patch origin/master
$ git send-email ... 00*

Later, you can see whether your changes have been applied by saying (still on topic):

$ git fetch  # update your notion of origin/master
$ git cherry -v

Concrete example

In a situation where topic consisted of three commits, and the maintainer applied two of them, the situation might look like:

$ git log --graph --oneline --decorate --boundary origin/master...topic
* 7654321 (origin/master) upstream tip commit
[... snip some other commits ...]
* cccc111 cherry-pick of C
* aaaa111 cherry-pick of A
[... snip a lot more that has happened ...]
| * cccc000 (topic) commit C
| * bbbb000 commit B
| * aaaa000 commit A
|/
o 1234567 branch point

In such cases, git-cherry shows a concise summary of what has yet to be applied:

$ git cherry origin/master topic
- cccc000... commit C
+ bbbb000... commit B
- aaaa000... commit A

Here, we see that the commits A and C (marked with -) can be dropped from your topic branch when you rebase it on top of origin/master, while the commit B (marked with +) still needs to be kept so that it will be sent to be applied to origin/master.

Using a limit

The optional <limit> is useful in cases where your topic is based on other work that is not in upstream. Expanding on the previous example, this might look like:

$ git log --graph --oneline --decorate --boundary origin/master...topic
* 7654321 (origin/master) upstream tip commit
[... snip some other commits ...]
* cccc111 cherry-pick of C
* aaaa111 cherry-pick of A
[... snip a lot more that has happened ...]
| * cccc000 (topic) commit C
| * bbbb000 commit B
| * aaaa000 commit A
| * 0000fff (base) unpublished stuff F
[... snip ...]
| * 0000aaa unpublished stuff A
|/
o 1234567 merge-base between upstream and topic

By specifying base as the limit, you can avoid listing commits between base and topic:

$ git cherry origin/master topic base
- cccc000... commit C
+ bbbb000... commit B
- aaaa000... commit A

git-cherry (1)

SYNOPSIS