Yep, that should be like the "Hide any commits in the current stack which aren’t on a branch" example. You just need to write ancestors(branches()) instead of branches(). (Also, you can use :expr as a shorthand for ancestors(expr), which is more convenient for interactive use.)

@arxanas Is the order of commits from query defined/consistent? Seems like its ordered such that a commit appears before its parent in the in the output (like git-log, or the opposite of smartlog).

I'm wondering because with a workflow where I'm linting files in a stack for issues, I want to find the first commit that introduces a problem, so that I can fix it at source. So it seems like I can just do git query -r 'xxx' | tac to get the commits I want with "older"/ancestor commits first.

Also, something I've found useful is to use a revset expression with smartlog to filter its output. Doing that is a good way to experiment with expressions, as it's easy to compare the filtered output with the default output to work out what your query is doing.

Is the order of commits from query defined/consistent?

I asked a similar question in discord last month and @arxanas answer suggests that the order may be consistent but is not defined. I briefly played with adding a sort() fn to revsets but didn't really get anywhere and gave for lack of enthusiasm.

Thanks @claytonrcarter, that's useful. I guess I'll quote what @arxanas said here for anyone not in Discord (you have to join the server to view your link):

arxanas — 16/08/2022
Mercurial has a sort function as well, so maybe. I didn't add anything like first() because I didn't think it was well-defined what order the commits are in; like if you do a & b and some x appears in both sets, would you expect to be in the order as if a were traversed first or b? (Some sets are optimized for " contains" checks; at the moment, we evaluate expressions in order, but a smart query planner might evaluate them in some arbitrary other order)

@h4l The intermediate results of the revsets are not sorted or guaranteed to be in a particular order, but git query always sorts its output topologically. I've updated https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Command:-git-query#use-in-scripts and opened #527 to clarify this. If we added the ability for commit sets to be ordered/sorted as part of the revset language itself, then we would want to also add functionality to git query to preserve that ordering.

In principle, the results of evaluating the revset when passed to other functions (git move, git hide, etc.) is not defined, but it doesn't matter for any of those.

Perfect, thanks @arxanas!

Thanks for the correction. I've updated the post. By the way, you can use git submit on the latest master to do the same thing a little more conveniently.

Oh nice! I'll have a look at that one. The --create flag looks useful