Symmetric of rebase / more intelligent cherry-pick

Hi,

I was thinking about a sort of symmetric to rebase, a kind of "intelligent" mass cherry-pick. For the sake of example let's call it "basere", although a better name would have to be found.

While
 git rebase UPSTREAM
moves the *current* branch (and any commit in it, but not in UPSTREAM)
on top of UPSTREAM,
 git basere UPSTREAM
would "cherry-pick" all commits in UPSTREAM that are not in HEAD to
the current branch.

git cherry-pick ..UPSTREAM *nearly* does what I want, except that it lacks rebase's intelligence of skipping commits that do the same textual changes as a commit already in the current branch. So maybe it should be an option to cherry-pick rather than a new command? E.g. --skip-same? What about making it cherry-picks *default* behaviour?

Why do I think it is useful? Take the case of a developer following two different origins A and B, and B uses rebase (not merge) to integrate changes from A, but not as often as one would like. A could for example be the "official" tree (e.g. linux Linus tree), and B a feature branch of a developer that is meant to eventually go into A "cleanly" at some future time and A's policy is that one has to rebase before sending a merge request. Then another developer wants to keep up with changes from *both* A and B. So, the situation could look like:

      A---A---A remotes/A/master
     /
X---X---B0---B1---L master
     \
      B0---B1---B2--B3 remotes/B/master

So one does "git rebase remotes/A/master master" and one gets

      A---A---A---B0---B1---L master
     /
X---X
     \
      B0---B1---B2--B3 remotes/B/master

I'd like to go to the situation:

      A---A---A---B0---B1---L---B2--B3 master
     /
X---X
     \
      B0---B1---B2--B3 remotes/B/master

Without having to manually find the cutoff point "B2" (or worse, if the history is more messy than that, as in:

      A---A---A---B1---L master
     /
X---X
     \
      B0---B1---B2--B3 remotes/B/master
)

The best way I have found to do that is:

git fetch B git checkout --no-track -b TMP remotes/B/master git rebase master git checkout master git merge --ff-only TMP git branch -d TMP

or less commands but more messy/fragile (and more work for git):

git fetch B git tag TMP git rebase remotes/B/master git rebase TMP git tag -d TMP

but that is rather onerous for something that should be just one command.

So what are your thoughts on that?

 - Good idea? Would you take a patch that does something like that?

 - Should it be cherry-picks's default behaviour?

 - An option to cherry-pick?

 - A new command? What name? Maybe "multi-cherry-pick"?

 - An option to rebase, e.g. "--pull" or "--incoming" or "--here"?
   ("--pull" is probably too confusing wrt to "git pull"; people will
    have trouble remembering which is which between "git pull
    --rebase" and "git rebase --pull"...)