Chapter 2. Exploring Project History

One of the most important parts of mastering a version control system is exploring project history, making use of the fact that with version control systems we have an archive of every version that has ever existed. Here, the reader will learn how to select, filter, and view the range of revisions; how to refer to the revisions (revision selection); and how to find revisions using different criteria.

This chapter will introduce the concept of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of revisions and explain how this concept relates to the ideas of branches, tags, and of the current branch in Git.

Here is the list of topics we will cover in this chapter:

• Revision selection
• Revision range selection, limiting history, history simplification
• Searching history with "pickaxe" tool and diff search
• Finding bugs with git bisect
• Line-wise history of file contents with git blame, and rename detection
• Selecting and formatting output (the pretty formats)
• Summarizing contribution with shortlog
• Specifying canonical author name and e-mail with .mailmap
• Viewing specific revision, diff output options, and viewing file at revision