git-sort is a a tool that reads a list of git commits and sorts them so that the partial ordering of parent-child relationships is respected. It performs this as a stable sort; it preserves the input order of commits that are on parallel development branches. This tool is useful when backporting a large number of commits so that the commits may be cherry-picked in an order such that no child commit appears before any of its ancestors.

The current implementation of git-sort is a proof of concept that uses git merge-base --is-ancestor. Having a more efficient version would ease the handling of large input lists.