The important thing to realize about git diff A B
is that it only ever shows you the difference between the states of the tree between exactly two points in the commit graph – it doesn’t care about the history. The ..
and ...
notations used for git diff
have the following meanings:
So when you run git diff master feature
that’s not just showing you the change introduced by the commit you’ve marked as 2
– the output should show the exact differences between the state of the tree committed in master
and the state of the tree committed in feature
. If it’s not showing you the earlier changes on your feature branch, perhaps you resolved conflicts from the earlier merges from master in favour of the version in master
?
As cebewee says, it may be that what you want is git log -p master..feature
, since git log
does care about history. The meaning of ..
and ...
for git log
are different since they select a range of commits:
Incidentally, it’s often said that merging from master
into a topic branch is the wrong thing to do – instead you should be rebasing, or merging your topic branch into master
after it is complete. This keeps the meaning of the topic branch easily understood. The Git maintainer did a (somewhat difficult to understand) blog post about the philosophy of merging which discusses that.