Re: [RFC] Terms to add to glossary

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: May 2, 2006, 06:56 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8xpkq5hw.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <e35sin$c1l$1@sea.gmane.org>

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> cherry picking:: 
>         In SCM jargon, cherry picking is used to describe the action of 
>         selecting which commit should be ported from one branch to another. 
>         In GIT it means given one existing commit, apply the change 
>         the patch introduces, and record a new commit that records it.

I am not sure what the focus of the above description is. I myself got more confused after reading it than before ;-). My impression was that we have been using the word "cherry-pick" in pretty standard way, but are you trying to stress that we use the word in a different sense?

"Action of selecting" is done by the user, perhaps with or without help from the tool. After deciding which one to "port", the way to perform the actual "port" would be different from SCM to SCM, and in GIT it is often done with the "git-cherry-pick" command. Are you saying the command is misnamed, and we should call a program that helps the user in "action of selecting" cherry-pick (actually, I think "git cherry" fits that description)?

If the focus is not to highlight the distinction but to help the end user, something like this might be better.

cherry-picking::
	In SCM jargon, "cherry pick" means to choose a subset of
	changes out of a series of changes (typically commits)
	and record them as a separate series of changes on top
	of different codebase.  In GIT, this is performed by
	"git cherry-pick" command to extract the change
	introduced by an existing commit and to record it based
	on the tip of the current branch as a new commit.