在更改日志的合并期间从所有先前提交中收集提交消息

Question

I have a main branch and a feature branch. The feature branch is several commits ahead of the main branch, and I'd like to merge the feature branch into the main branch. I don't intend to --squash and I don't want to rebase because I like preserving the history.

I like to summarize what changed in the merge's commit message because the feature branch history can get convoluted, and a good starting point for me is to copy & edit all of the commit messages from the feature branch's assorted commits since the last merge .

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that git can compile these messages for me, but I don't remember where I read that or how to do it.

Apologies if this is a duplicate, but several Google and SO searches have failed to bring this up.

Edit: Essentially what I'm trying to do is build a changelog for everything that changed between releases.

Answer 1

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that git can compile these messages for me

Maybe through git rebase , as shown here : don't go through the rebase (cancel it), but copy-paste the aggregated commit messages subjects shown during the rebase.

Otherwise, you could not those messages manually (as described here ).

Or use a tool like antham/chyle to fetch those commit messages from your history.

Answer 2

A

git log --oneline HEAD ^master

will create an output like this in git rebase -i master .

Perhaps pipe through | cat | cat to remove the colored annotations.

Answer 3

The --log parameter for merge is what you are looking for:

  --log[=<n>], --no-log
       In addition to branch names, populate the log message with one-line
       descriptions from at most <n> actual commits that are being merged.
       See also git-fmt-merge-msg(1).