Re: how to most effectively cherry pick by selective patch hunk?

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 11, 2021, 00:54 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPp-BGKvsqQ3Xn_7Xi0GqxKS5qSdN6WyLYUXWWtzwdPqT_zTQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <87im712mi7.fsf@igel.home>

On Tue, Feb 9, 2021 at 11:44 PM Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

>
> On Feb 09 2021, Jeff King wrote:
>
> > Of course that involves a change to Git, and you were looking for
> > something you could do with existing versions. :) You can emulate it by
> > making the commit's parent equivalent to your current state. I.e.:
> >
> >   git checkout --detach ;# detached HEAD for temporary commit
> >   git cherry-pick $commit ;# maybe deal with conflicts
> >   commit=$(git rev-parse --verify HEAD) ;# remember the temp commit
> >   git checkout - ;# back to your branch
> >   git checkout -p $commit
>
> Alternatively, you could cherry-pick normally, then use
>  git checkout -p HEAD^
> to remove what you don't want.

Or, going into the slightly esoteric, you could define a custom local merge driver for the particular file you want to ignore and say that merges of that file always use the original version and ignore changes made on both sides.

man gitattributes(5), search for "filfre"

Appears to be unchanged since git-2.5.0.

Only ever used them once myself long ago (and not for a real usecase), because I wanted to understand what they were for. However, it seems like they might be useful here.