Re: customizing "cherry picked from commit abcd" comment

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 30, 2025, 15:39 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq5xd054r2.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <aNus0ulSTb4rAYdF@ugly.lan>

Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen@gmx.de> writes:

> i sometimes customize this pseudo-footer as well, but it's usually
> things like "(partially cherry-picked ...)" or "(... from
> <repo>/<sha1>)", etc.

That does sound a sensible thing to do, assuming that the original commit is public. See below for a backstory why it is only a commit object name and nothing else.

> your particular use case would imo be better addressed by implementing
> bi-directional linking between picked commits via a standardized
> git-notes namespace.

A nice property of notes is that they can be added after the fact and can be mde bidirectional, so in a workflow allows adopting this great suggestion, it is a very sensible thing to do.

Show 5 quoted lines

> the pseudo-trailer is really just a hack in the first place, and
> afaict that status quo results from an ideological commitment against
> cherry-picks during the early history of git. but it's really kinda
> silly that subversion and perforce have better tracking of
> cherry-picks to this date, even when it's their only way to do merges.

I do not know what "an ideological commitment" refers to in this context, but if I recall correctly, the reason why I originally added the "cherry picked from" message in 48313592 (Redo "revert" using three-way merge machinery., 2005-08-27) was because of end-user requests, and given that the linux-kernel was pretty much the only large customer back then, I suspect it came from there.

The intention was for the original commit to be also be public and in the same project (e.g., you cherry-pick a commit from the main branch developing towards the next great version, down to a maintenance branch for the previous release), which made the commit object name alone an sufficient identifier (also, this way predated the invention of "git show -s --format=reference", so it is really a dry hexadecimal object name and nothing else).

Initially, the feature to add the message was enabled by default. Without passing an option, you always got the message in the cherry-picked result.

Later, it was found that people ended up many commits with "cherry picked from" messages that refer to commit objects that are not available anywhere, because they cherry-pick across their private branches while developing their patches, and the practice started littering the public commits with these "useless" (because they do not point at any commits that are part of anybody's official history) references to the original commits they were cherry-picked from. And this made us turn the feature off by default, adding the message only when the user explicitly asks to do so.