This is the correct answer. For some reason, the top-voted comment is some nonsense about Git's branching, which was never something I've desired or every found useful in a decade of rigorous daily use with both. To the contrary, git's branching model still trips me up all the time, specifically when I want to do things like list all the commits in the branch.
Basically the problem is that unlike Mercurial branches which are actually branches while git branches are just a pointer to a particular commit. That pointer has no knowledge about what other commits are in the branch and the pointer can be moved anywhere across the tree (even to unrelated commits) with ease. Apart from the reflog, it's basically not possible to ask about the set of commits in the branch. The best you can do is never ever move the branch pointer except forward and make a note of the branch that your branch branched off of so you can do things like `git diff my-branch..parent-branch` (`hg diff -b my-branch` iirc). And this is just one of dozens of git warts.
weberc2|7 years ago
Basically the problem is that unlike Mercurial branches which are actually branches while git branches are just a pointer to a particular commit. That pointer has no knowledge about what other commits are in the branch and the pointer can be moved anywhere across the tree (even to unrelated commits) with ease. Apart from the reflog, it's basically not possible to ask about the set of commits in the branch. The best you can do is never ever move the branch pointer except forward and make a note of the branch that your branch branched off of so you can do things like `git diff my-branch..parent-branch` (`hg diff -b my-branch` iirc). And this is just one of dozens of git warts.
JimDabell|7 years ago
ksec|7 years ago