In a previous post I showed how to compare branches with git log master..topic. This method is great, but it only shows commits in topic not yet in master based on a sha1 comparison. If we have another branch called shared that has been merged into master and topic, git log master..topic would show the commits that were merged from shared even though they have been merged into topic and master. If we use git cherry -v topic master or git log --cherry master..topic, the actual diffs from each commit will be compared instead of only the sha1. This will make sure the commits from shared will not show up. Here is an example.
Notice how the commit Merge branch 'shared' into topic doesn’t really need to show up as part of topic when comparing to master because master also has that merge. --cherry compares the diff of the merge so that it’s not included in the command git log --oneline --cherry master..topic. This would also ignore shared cherry picked commits.