How to find the nearest parent of a Git branch?

A rephrasal

Another way to phrase the question is "What is the nearest commit that resides on a branch other than the current branch, and which branch is that?"

A solution

You can find it with a little bit of command-line magic

git show-branch \
| sed "s/].*//" \
| grep "\*" \
| grep -v "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)" \
| head -n1 \
| sed "s/^.*\[//"

With AWK:

git show-branch -a \
| grep '\*' \
| grep -v `git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` \
| head -n1 \
| sed 's/[^\[]*//' \
| awk 'match($0, /\[[a-zA-Z0-9\/.-]+\]/) { print substr( $0, RSTART+1, RLENGTH-2 )}'

Here's how it works:

  1. Display a textual history of all commits, including remote branches.
  2. Ancestors of the current commit are indicated by a star. Filter out everything else.
  3. Ignore all the commits in the current branch.
  4. The first result will be the nearest ancestor branch. Ignore the other results.
  5. Branch names are displayed [in brackets]. Ignore everything outside the brackets, and the brackets.
  6. Sometimes the branch name will include a ~# or ^# to indicate how many commits are between the referenced commit and the branch tip. We don't care. Ignore them.

And the result

Running the above code on

 A---B---D <-master
      \
       \
        C---E---I <-develop
             \
              \
               F---G---H <-topic

Will give you develop if you run it from H and master if you run it from I.

The code is available as a gist.


Assuming that the remote repository has a copy of the develop branch (your initial description describes it in a local repository, but it sounds like it also exists in the remote), you should be able to achieve what I think you want, but the approach is a bit different from what you have envisioned.

Git’s history is based on a DAG of commits. Branches (and “refs” in general) are just transient labels that point to specific commits in the continually growing commit DAG. As such, the relationship between branches can vary over time, but the relationship between commits does not.

    ---o---1                foo
            \
             2---3---o      bar
                  \
                   4
                    \
                     5---6  baz

It looks like baz is based on (an old version of) bar? But what if we delete bar?

    ---o---1                foo
            \
             2---3
                  \
                   4
                    \
                     5---6  baz

Now it looks like baz is based on foo. But the ancestry of baz did not change. We just removed a label (and the resulting dangling commit). And what if we add a new label at 4?

    ---o---1                foo
            \
             2---3
                  \
                   4        quux
                    \
                     5---6  baz

Now it looks like baz is based on quux. Still, the ancestry did not change, only the labels changed.

If, however, we were asking “is commit 6 a descendent of commit 3?” (assuming 3 and 6 are full SHA-1 commit names), then the answer would be “yes”, whether the bar and quux labels are present or not.

So, you could ask questions like “is the pushed commit a descendent of the current tip of the develop branch?”, but you can not reliably ask “what is the parent branch of the pushed commit?”.

A mostly reliable question that seems to get close to what you want is:

For all the pushed commit’s ancestors (excluding the current tip of develop and its ancestors), that have the current tip of develop as a parent:

  • does at least one such commit exist?
  • are all such commits single-parent commits?

Which could be implemented as:

pushedrev=...
basename=develop
if ! baserev="$(git rev-parse --verify refs/heads/"$basename" 2>/dev/null)"; then
    echo "'$basename' is missing, call for help!"
    exit 1
fi
parents_of_children_of_base="$(
  git rev-list --pretty=tformat:%P "$pushedrev" --not "$baserev" |
  grep -F "$baserev"
)"
case ",$parents_of_children_of_base" in
    ,)     echo "must descend from tip of '$basename'"
           exit 1 ;;
    ,*\ *) echo "must not merge tip of '$basename' (rebase instead)"
           exit 1 ;;
    ,*)    exit 0 ;;
esac

This will cover some of what you want restricted, but maybe not everything.

For reference, here is an extended example history:

    A                                   master
     \
      \                    o-----J
       \                  /       \
        \                | o---K---L
         \               |/
          C--------------D              develop
           \             |\
            F---G---H    | F'--G'--H'
                    |    |\
                    |    | o---o---o---N
                     \   \      \       \
                      \   \      o---o---P
                       \   \
                        R---S

The above code could be used to reject Hand S while accepting H', J, K, or N, but it would also accept L and P (they involve merges, but they do not merge the tip of develop).

To also reject L and P, you can change the question and ask

For all the pushed commit’s ancestors (excluding the current tip of develop and its ancestors):

  • are there any commits with two parents?
  • if not, does at least one such commit have the current tip of develop its (only) parent?
pushedrev=...
basename=develop
if ! baserev="$(git rev-parse --verify refs/heads/"$basename" 2>/dev/null)"; then
    echo "'$basename' is missing, call for help!"
    exit 1
fi
parents_of_commits_beyond_base="$(
  git rev-list --pretty=tformat:%P "$pushedrev" --not "$baserev" |
  grep -v '^commit '
)"
case "$parents_of_commits_beyond_base" in
    *\ *)          echo "must not push merge commits (rebase instead)"
                   exit 1 ;;
    *"$baserev"*)  exit 0 ;;
    *)             echo "must descend from tip of '$basename'"
                   exit 1 ;;
esac

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