Re: [PATCH 5/7] [doc] git-cherry-pick: link to new merge conflicts guide

From: Julia Evans <julia@jvns.ca>
Date: Sep 28, 2026, 20:58 UTC
Message-ID: <cc1af300-d296-49c8-98ae-8b30ef11ada3@app.fastmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqpky1uu6t.fsf@gitster.g>

> The new document may explain how to resolve conflicts, but are the
> details removed from here that are specific to the 'cherry-pick'
> operation also covered there?

I'll update this series to make fewer changes to this page as you suggest to make the diff smaller.

> For example, during a difficult cherry-pick, it is often handy to be
> able to run 'git show CHERRY_PICK_HEAD', but now users are not told
> about the pseudo-ref, which seems like a real loss.

I'll put this back for now, but I removed it because I couldn't understand why CHERRY_PICK_HEAD might be useful, and some of my user research showed that almost nobody uses `CHERRY_PICK_HEAD`. I always appreciate people telling me why these things are actually useful though, and even if very few people use something, maybe more people would use it if it was clear why it's useful :)

My best guess (based on what you said) is that `CHERRY_PICK_HEAD` is only useful if you're cherry-picking multiple commits at the same time. Is the following an accurate explanation?:

> If the conflict happened when cherry picking multiple commits, you can run
> `git show CHERRY_PICK_HEAD` to see the commit that Git failed to apply.

Show 7 quoted lines

> The fact that cleanly auto-resolved contents for paths are recorded
> in the index may be shared with all other merge-like operations,
> and it need not be part of the "how to resolve a conflicted
> merge-like operation" recipe, but users need to be assured that this
> is what happens somewhere in the documentation set.  The list
> removed here served that purpose for this specific command, but it
> is now gone.

That makes sense to me. One major benefit of making a centralized page is that each man page explains different aspects of the merge conflict process, and we can make sure that anyone who needs to solve a merge conflict is aware of all the aspects. I'll think about how to explain that.