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Comment by noway421 | Hacker News Reader

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noway421·

You can diff two tips like so:

https://github.com/{org}/{repo}/compare/{commitish1}..{commi...

Example:

https://github.com/facebook/react-native/compare/0.65-stable...

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Those are refs. Not commits. GitHub removes access to the old commits of a branch when the branch is force-pushed (say, after a rebase). I'm interested in comparing the branch in its current state against it's previous state.

tl;dr you can put commit hashes in the place where the parent comment put tags, and your exact use case actually has a dedicated link on the PR page.

The PR interface actually exposes this for force-pushes, but the UI discovery for this is horrible. It turns out that the "force-pushed" part in the little message in the github UI is actually a link. This link points to the diff between the old and the new HEAD of the branch.

As an example you can look at this PR:

https://github.com/JelteF/derive_more/pull/161

It has this little message somewhere down the page:

Monadic-Cat force-pushed the add-unwrap branch from e130dbe to 25235aa 4 months ago

If you then click "force-pushed" in that message you go to the "compare" page, which shows the diff between the two commits:

https://github.com/JelteF/derive_more/compare/e130dbe6b2a429...

Disclaimer: I'm a Micrsoft employee, but don't work on Github. I'm a daily user of Github though.

I have been told this multiple times, and I've tried this too. Maybe it works for public repos, but it doesn't work for private repos.

Pressing the "force-pushed" link works fine for me on private repos too. It could be that they fixed this recently, I only found out about this feature ~a month ago. If it still does not work on private repos for you, maybe try reaching out for support. It could be that there's some bug you're hitting.

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