Re: Commiting changes onto more than one branch

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>
Date: Nov 25, 2009, 17:43 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0911251237000.2059@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <6b4a562b0911250831q332ac3b5m6ee38f59e7a6f391@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Mike Jarmy wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> My question is this:  How do I manage a checkin for a bugfix that
> affects, say, only branches v3, v4, and v5?
> 
> Suppose that I checkout the v3 branch, and fix the bug by editing
> several different files.  (Lets assume for now that the files in
> question have not diverged between any of the 3 branches, even though
> tons of other files have changed).  How do I commit the bugfix into
> all of v3, v4 and v5?  Clearly, merging the branches together would be
> bad.  So I think what I should do is perform 3 different commits, but
> I'm not quite sure how to juggle the git index (or stash or whatever)
> to accomplish this.  This may be a really obvious question, but I'm a
> confused git newbie.

Besides what other people have already suggested, you might simply elect to use 'git cherry-pick' on the v4 and v5 branches to copy the fix from the v3 branch.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Also, even though I may need to do 3 commits, it would be nice if the
> commits were related together in some way, since in a sense they
> represent only one action (namely, fixing the bug).  Is there a way to
> do that, so that its clear in gitk that it was really one unified
> thing?

You can use the -x argument with 'git cherry-pick'. This won't create a formal history graph but at least the commit log will record a reference to the original fix.

Nicolas