Re: [PATCH] cherry-pick: do not error on non-merge commits when '-m 1' is specified

> Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> When cherry-picking multiple commits, it's impossible to have both
>> merge- and non-merge commits on the same command-line. Not specifying
>> '-m 1' results in cherry-pick refusing to handle merge commits, while
>> specifying '-m 1' fails on non-merge commits.
>
> Allowing "-m1" even when picking a single parent commit, because
> the 1-st parent is defined for such a commit, makes sense, espeially
> when running a cherry-pick on a range, exactly for the above reason.
> It is slightly less so when cherry-picking a single commit, but not
> by a large margin.
>
> I think the original reasoning for requiring "-m $n" not present,
> especially because cherry-pick was originally for replaying only a
> single commit, was because it would lead somebody to propose that
> the command should behave as if -m1 is always given (and when trying
> to cherry-pick a merge relative to its second parent, give -m2 to
> override it), which in turn encourage the 'first-parent is special'
> world-view from the tool-side.  IOW, "The worldview to treat the
> first-parent chain specially is correct, because Git has many
> features to work with that worldview conveniently" was something we
> wanted to avoid; rather "Such and such workflows benefit from
> treating the first-parent chain specially, so let's add features to
> do so" was we wanted to do, and of course, back then cherry-pick
> that allows mixture of merges and single-parent commits to be
> picked, which would have made the need to do something like this
> patch does felt greater, did not exist.
>
> Now, it appears, at least to me, that the world pretty much accepted
> that the first-parent worldview is often very convenient and worth
> supporting by the tool, so the next logical step might be to set
> opts->mainline to 1 by default (and allow an explicit "-m $n" from
> the command line to override it).  But that should happen after this
> patch lands---it is logically a separate step, I would think.