Checking git-cherry-pick Use Case

Guys,

Could you sanity check me on two issues with my "work flow" here, please? Maybe I could do something better/easier?

I have a repo with a bunch of commits coming from several different places (me, co-worker, remote repo, etc). I'm applying co-worker's patches into "cow" branch. I'm applying my changes directly to "jdl" branch" I'm pulling in "origin" crude.

Ultimately, I want to do development against the "sum total set of all known patches supplied by anyone". Oh yeah. So I make a "dev" branch that has "cow" + "jdl" + "origin".

However, at the end of the development day, I want to send just _my_ patches upstream. Thus, I need to have my changes sitting around neatly on the "jdl" branch.

I don't want to develop in the "jdl" branch, as it doesn't have everything needed to test stuff properly (missing "cow" code, eg.). So I actually edit and commit in the "dev" branch where everything is unioned.

To isolate just my changes out of the "dev" branch into the "jdl" branch, I cherry pick them like this:

    $ git checkout dev
    $     <do edit-compile-test cycle until all is well>
    $ git commit -m "Stuff jdl made up and committed"

Now, things look, in part, like this:

        ! [dev] Stuff jdl made up and committed
         * [jdl] Early stuff jdl made up
          ! [origin] Original stuff
        ---
        +   [dev] Stuff jdl made up and committed
        +   [dev^] Merge branch 'jdl'
        ++  [jdl] Early stuff jdl made up
        +++ [origin] Original stuff

Then I pull that last "dev" commit over to "jdl":

    $ git checkout jdl
    $ git cherry-pick -r dev

Now it looks like this:

        ! [dev] Stuff jdl made up and committed
         * [jdl] Early stuff jdl made up
          ! [origin] Original stuff
        ---
         +  [jdl] Stuff jdl made up and committed
        +   [dev] Stuff jdl made up and committed
        +   [dev^] Merge branch 'jdl'
        ++  [jdl^] Early stuff jdl made up
        +++ [origin] Original stuff

My first question is that I expected to see something more like this (hand edited):

	! [dev] Stuff jdl made up and committed
         * [jdl] Early stuff jdl made up
          ! [origin] Original stuff
        ---
        ++  [dev] Stuff jdl made up and committed
        +   [dev^] Merge branch 'jdl'
        ++  [jdl^] Early stuff jdl made up
        +++ [origin] Original stuff

That is, the _same_ commit is now in both the "dev" and "jdl" branches, so why does it have two lines here?

And finally, the "general" question: Is this a sane work-flow used by anyone else? Or is there a different perhaps even better way to do what I described above?

Thanks, jdl

Jon Loeliger <jdl@freescale.com> writes:

Because they are not the same commit; they are two separate commits, that happen to have the same commit log message and authorship information, and perhaps even result to show the same "diff" if asked by 1-parameter git-diff-tree, but they are different commit objects nevertheless.

Funnily enough, I think I sent out almost exactly the same message as yours the last couple of days regarding workflows, after I hacked a bit on gitweb ;-).