Another downside to the linear Git history that I noticed today: `git branch -d review/[number]` is less likely to succeed, because the commit was probably rebased on merge, so it’s now a different commit even if the version I had previously downloaded with `git review -d [number]` was still the latest version.

Hello,

I delete them without looking by forcing the deletion: `git branch -D`.  That is because I consider them ephemeral and in almost any case I always refetch the change from Gerrit.

`git branch -d` checks whether the branch got merged, and with Gerrit rebasing a patch behind our hood, it get lost since the commit might have a different sha1 as the parent might be different.

There is another command that is used for email based workflow: git cherry. It compares the commits based on the diff and shows which commits have been applied and which one are yet to be applied

Assuming your:

* local branch `review/user/num` tracks a remote branch (which git-review -d should do)
* the remote is up-to-date (git fetch origin / git fetch --all / git remote update)

Then when invoking `git cherry -v`, it compares the pending patches in your local branch with the remote and print them. The commits that have an equivalent in the remote branch are prefixed with a `-` (they have been merged), those that did not are prefixed with a `+`.

Example with integration/config, I had a local branch review/cmelo/T397271 which pointed to https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/integration/config/+/1163347/3. The branch is not fully merged:

git branch -d review/cmelo/T397271
error: The branch 'review/cmelo/T397271' is not fully merged.

But the patch has been applied:

$ git checkout review/cmelo/T397271
Switched to branch 'review/cmelo/T397271'
Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged,
and have 1 and 74 different commits each, respectively.
$ git cherry -v
- 0c481434f44b95c354bbacf11258188e8b842f59 zuul: [mediawiki/extensions/CampaignEvents] add cldr as dependency

Or pull the branch and it is then deletable.

I am pretty sure git-review could be taught to automatically delete local review branches by using `git cherry` ;)

Antoine "hashar" Musso