Re: How to pull only a few files from one branch to another?

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 24, 2007, 10:16 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0701241104300.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701231937310.3606@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Hi,

On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> NOTE NOTE NOTE! I don't actually think "git merge-one-file" really works 
> correctly as-is for your usage case. It _kind_of_ gets the result you 
> want, but it's not really written to be used like that, and you'll get an 
> error from the
> 
> 	git-checkout-index -f --stage=2 -- "$4" &&
> 		cat "$src1" >"$4"
> 
> stage because stage 2 didn't exist ("git-merge-one-file" is really only 
> supposed to be called by a real merge).
> 
> But it's _almost_ usable that way. Maybe Dscho or Junio wants to make it 
> work the extra final mile.

I don't really see the point, but yes, it would be easy enough (at least in the builtin version I sent out last night).

Note that the checkout-index is used _purely_ to set the correct mode (at least as far as I can tell). *Clickety-click* well, seems you had something different in mind on June 8th, 2005. "make sure that the full pathname is created". This, of course, is missing from the builtin merge-one-file (yet).

> Not exactly pretty. If this is something people want to do often, we'd 
> need to generate some porcelain for it.

I fully expect people to agree that this is not the way to go. I think cherry-picking is what you were after, Bill, correct?

Having said that, I find myself picking changes from a side-branch (with too many one-liner commits) with this command:

	git diff -R sidebranch file1 file2.. | git apply --index

Ciao, Dscho