Design time! 😄 Here are a couple problems we are aiming to solve with comparing between two branches:

There currently isn't a way to see how far we've diverged from a branch. As a result, it's easy for our working branch to diverge from a default branch (such as master) over time.
There's no easy to see what kind of changes are about to be brought in. This also adds to the difficulty of not being able to see if there are any overlapping work.

I started off with a version where I played around with a graph/timeline/subway map visualization to show which commits existed on which branch. The goal at the time was to be able to visualize the result of a merge (as well as understand which specific commits would be brought in:

After some discussion, we've agreed on some of the limitations of that design:

The graph doesn't offer any value and (not seen in the crop) doesn't accurately represent events such as merges.
We're not convinced of the value of showing all of the commits
We're losing precious horizontal space

Fast-forward a few rounds of back and forth designing, we landed on a flow on what we think comparing (and merging upstream changes) could look like:

Comparing & Merging Flow

When it's time to see how far a working branch has diverged from another, the developer will click into the "Compare" tab (formerly "History"). When there's initially no branch being compared to, we'll display the working branch's history.
Clicking on the "Choose a branch..." will open a little dropdown where the developer can search for a branch to compare.
After selecting a branch, the list will filter down to only the commits that the working branch is missing from the target branch. From there, the developer can choose to merge those commits into their working branch, or they can stop comparing by selecting "None" in the branch dropdown.

Another problem we plan on tackling for 1.1 is merge conflict. We thought that the merge section could be an opportunity to surface a conflict ahead of time instead of presenting an error after clicking "merge." We will still allow them to attempt a merge, and we'll then kick off into the merge conflict resolution flow.

Relationship between branches #2639

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