Git Commands for Messy People

I am terrible at keeping my git branches in order. Particularly since I work across multiple machines and forget where things are I will often have multiple branches with different names being different versions of the same review.

On a project I work on frequently I currently have 71 local branches which are a mix of my code, some code reviews, and some branches that were for trialling ideas. git review at least prefixes branches it downloads with review/ but that doesn’t help to figure out what was happening with local branches labelled auth through auth-4.

However this post isn’t about me fixing my terrible habit it’s about two git commands which help me work with the mess.

The first is an alias which I called branch-date:

[alias]
    branch-date = "!git for-each-ref --sort=committerdate --format='%1B[32m%(committerdate:iso8601) %1B[34m%(committerdate:relative) %1B[0;m%(refname:short)' refs/heads/"

This gives a nicely formatted list of branches in the project sorted by the last time they were committed to and how long ago it was. So if I know I’m looking for a branch that I last worked on last week I can quickly locate those branches.

List of branches ordered by date

The next is a script to figure out which of my branches have made it through review and have been merged upstream which I called branch-merged.

Using git you can already call git branch --merged master to determine which branches are fully merged into the master branch. However this won’t take into account if a later version of a review was merged, in which case I can probably get rid of that branch.

We can figure this out by using the Commit-Id: field of our Gerrit reviews.

#!/bin/bash # create an associative array of all the changes declare -A MERGED for commit in `git log master | grep Change-Id | cut -d : -f 2`; do MERGED["$commit"]=1 done for branch in `git branch | grep -v master`; do found=1 # for every commit on the branch check to ensure its in master for commit in `git log $branch | grep Change-Id | cut -d : -f 2`; do if [[ ! ${MERGED["$commit"]} ]]; then # if it's not in master then this branch wasn't merged so we # want to break out and not print its name. found=0 break fi done if [ $found = 1 ]; then # if all of the Commit-Ids on branch were also in master then # print out the branch name because we can probably get rid of it echo $branch fi done

So print out the branches where all the Commit-Ids are also in master. It’s not greatly efficient and if you are working with code bases with long histories you might need to limit the depth, but given that it doesn’t run often it completes quickly enough.

There’s no guarantee that there wasn’t something new in those branches, but most likely it was an earlier review or test code that is no longer relevant. I was considering a tool that could use the Commit-Id to figure out from gerrit if a branch is an exact match to one that was previously up for review and so contained no possibly useful experimenting code, but teaching myself to clean up branches as I go is probably a better use of my time.

jamielennox.net

Git Commands for Messy People

Comments