CODEWITHSUNDEEP
git
cambunctious
cambunctious

Reputation: 9572

Git reflog graph?

Is there any way to show a git log graph with reflog references like mybranch@{N}? This would be useful after doing a rebase to see the previous and current versions of the branch in a graph. Basically what I want (I think) is git log --graph --walk-reflogs mybranch but that gives me an error fatal: cannot combine --walk-reflogs with history-limiting options.

I can get very close with git log --graph --reflog mybranch but that does not show reflog references like mybranch@{1}.

Maybe this is a limitation since you can't walk the ancestry and the reflog in the same command? Still, it seems like there should be a way to walk the reflog 5 entries or so and feed those references with labels to git log --graph.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 2081

Answers (1)

torek
torek

Reputation: 487963

Maybe this is a limitation since you can't walk the ancestry and the reflog in the same command?

That's exactly right.

The main issue here is that Git can only add these label-decorators (%d for normal decorations, or %gD for reflog selector decorations) to commits if it can find the decorator. To allow the %d decorators to work, Git always reads all branch and tag and other reference names. But for %gD to work, Git must read the reflog entries, and unless you use --walk-reflogs (or -g for short), it doesn't read the reflog entries at all. Once you do use -g, it does read the reflogs, but stops walking the commit graph.

There's no fundamental reason Git couldn't read all reflogs if and when %gD appeared in the formatting directives, so that it could add those decorators, but it doesn't today.

There's a separate, but equally important, problem that occurs if and when you solve this first one: --graph cannot be combined with --no-walk and --walk-reflogs implies --no-walk (they're separate internal walk functions and the graph-generating code depends heavily on using the history walker, not the reflog walker).

(The best you can do with current Git is parse the output from git log, while also reading all the reflog values yourself. You can then write your own code to add reflog labels.)

Upvotes: 8

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