threads / patch / 64043

patchcherry-pick: document rev-list options

Subject: [PATCH] cherry-pick: document rev-list options

## tl;dr

6 messages between Aug 27, 2025 and Aug 27, 2025. Diffs are folded; open one to read it.

replies: 5people: 4as markdown or json

Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget· Aug 27, 2025, 07:17 UTC · lore
From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>

In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14), we added a handful of new options to `git cherry-pick`, but did not document them except by example. We have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's add it now.

Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
---
    cherry-pick: document rev-list options
    
    Reported on socials (https://social.tchncs.de/@arj/115099134305875190).
    rev-list-options.adoc is unfortunately pretty verbose, but I think it's
    still better than having undocumented secret options. Or, worse, options
    that are in examples but not anywhere else ;)
Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-git-2042%2Fnasamuffin%2Fcherry-pick-docs-v1
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-git-2042/nasamuffin/cherry-pick-docs-v1
Pull-Request: https://github.com/git/git/pull/2042
 Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
Show changes to Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc +2 −0
diff --git a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
index 42b41923d5f..03848aa9f21 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
@@ -174,6 +174,8 @@ fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allow-empty` are specified.
 
 include::rerere-options.adoc[]
 
+include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
+
 SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
 ---------------------
 include::sequencer.adoc[]

base-commit: f814da676ae46aac5be0a98b99373a76dee6cedb

-- 
gitgitgadget
Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget· Aug 27, 2025, 07:22 UTC · re: Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget · lore

[PATCH v2] doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick

From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>

In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14), we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`, but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's add it now, to both commands.

Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
---
    cherry-pick: document rev-list options
    
    Ach, sorry for the noise, turns out it touched both revert and
    cherry-pick, might as well do the docs for both.
Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-git-2042%2Fnasamuffin%2Fcherry-pick-docs-v2
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-git-2042/nasamuffin/cherry-pick-docs-v2
Pull-Request: https://github.com/git/git/pull/2042
Range-diff vs v1:
 1:  fa352ccda08 ! 1:  f41cb4e8abc cherry-pick: document rev-list options
     @@ Metadata
      Author: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
      
       ## Commit message ##
     -    cherry-pick: document rev-list options
     +    doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick
      
          In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14),
     -    we added a handful of new options to `git cherry-pick`, but did not
     -    document them except by example. We have a nice shorthand for adding the
     -    rev-list documentation, so let's add it now.
     +    we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`,
     +    but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We
     +    have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's
     +    add it now, to both commands.
      
          Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
          Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
     @@ Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc: fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allo
       SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
       ---------------------
       include::sequencer.adoc[]
     +
     + ## Documentation/git-revert.adoc ##
     +@@ Documentation/git-revert.adoc: include::rerere-options.adoc[]
     + 	configuration variable can be used to enable this option by
     + 	default.
     + 
     ++include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
     + 
     + SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
     + ---------------------
 Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc | 2 ++
 Documentation/git-revert.adoc      | 1 +
 2 files changed, 3 insertions(+)
Show changes to 2 files +3 −0

Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc, Documentation/git-revert.adoc

diff --git a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
index 42b41923d5f..03848aa9f21 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
@@ -174,6 +174,8 @@ fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allow-empty` are specified.
 
 include::rerere-options.adoc[]
 
+include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
+
 SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
 ---------------------
 include::sequencer.adoc[]
diff --git a/Documentation/git-revert.adoc b/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
index ffba365e639..28827807473 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
@@ -122,6 +122,7 @@ include::rerere-options.adoc[]
 	configuration variable can be used to enable this option by
 	default.
 
+include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
 
 SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
 ---------------------

base-commit: f814da676ae46aac5be0a98b99373a76dee6cedb

-- 
gitgitgadget
Andrew Jeffery· Aug 27, 2025, 07:36 UTC · re: Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget · lore

Re: [PATCH v2] doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick

On Wed, 27 Aug 2025, at 16:52, Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget wrote:
Show 9 quoted lines
> From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
>
> In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14),
> we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`,
> but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We
> have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's
> add it now, to both commands.
>
> Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
Thanks!
My only input is my surname is spelled the surprising way: s/Jeffrey/Jeffery/ :) Hopefully someone can fix that up when applying it rather than needing a v3!
Andrew
Phillip Wood· Aug 27, 2025, 09:41 UTC · re: Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget · lore

Re: [PATCH v2] doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick

Hi Emily
On 27/08/2025 08:22, Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget wrote:
Show 7 quoted lines
> From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
> 
> In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14),
> we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`,
> but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We
> have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's
> add it now, to both commands.

I agree that it would be helpful to have a some rev-list options included here but this adds a huge amount of text to the man page which comes before the documentation for frequently used options like "--continue". I'm not sure all of the new text is relevant to cherry-pick and revert. For instance do we need to document --bisect, -cherry-mark and --boundary here? I'm not sure the History Simplification and Commit Formatting sections are relevant either. There are already a bunch of ifdefs in rev-list-options.adoc that change what's included depending on which command we're documenting, maybe we should add some more for the cherry-pick and revert documentation?

Thanks
Phillip> Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
Show 79 quoted lines
> Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
> ---
>      cherry-pick: document rev-list options
>      
>      Ach, sorry for the noise, turns out it touched both revert and
>      cherry-pick, might as well do the docs for both.
> 
> Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-git-2042%2Fnasamuffin%2Fcherry-pick-docs-v2
> Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-git-2042/nasamuffin/cherry-pick-docs-v2
> Pull-Request: https://github.com/git/git/pull/2042
> 
> Range-diff vs v1:
> 
>   1:  fa352ccda08 ! 1:  f41cb4e8abc cherry-pick: document rev-list options
>       @@ Metadata
>        Author: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
>        
>         ## Commit message ##
>       -    cherry-pick: document rev-list options
>       +    doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick
>        
>            In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14),
>       -    we added a handful of new options to `git cherry-pick`, but did not
>       -    document them except by example. We have a nice shorthand for adding the
>       -    rev-list documentation, so let's add it now.
>       +    we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`,
>       +    but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We
>       +    have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's
>       +    add it now, to both commands.
>        
>            Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
>            Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
>       @@ Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc: fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allo
>         SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
>         ---------------------
>         include::sequencer.adoc[]
>       +
>       + ## Documentation/git-revert.adoc ##
>       +@@ Documentation/git-revert.adoc: include::rerere-options.adoc[]
>       + 	configuration variable can be used to enable this option by
>       + 	default.
>       +
>       ++include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
>       +
>       + SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
>       + ---------------------
> 
> 
>   Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc | 2 ++
>   Documentation/git-revert.adoc      | 1 +
>   2 files changed, 3 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> index 42b41923d5f..03848aa9f21 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> +++ b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> @@ -174,6 +174,8 @@ fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allow-empty` are specified.
>   
>   include::rerere-options.adoc[]
>   
> +include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
> +
>   SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
>   ---------------------
>   include::sequencer.adoc[]
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-revert.adoc b/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
> index ffba365e639..28827807473 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
> +++ b/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
> @@ -122,6 +122,7 @@ include::rerere-options.adoc[]
>   	configuration variable can be used to enable this option by
>   	default.
>   
> +include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
>   
>   SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
>   ---------------------
> 
> base-commit: f814da676ae46aac5be0a98b99373a76dee6cedb
Emily Shaffer· Aug 27, 2025, 11:34 UTC · re: Phillip Wood · lore

Re: [PATCH v2] doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick

On Wed, Aug 27, 2025 at 11:41 AM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:
Show 22 quoted lines
>
> Hi Emily
>
> On 27/08/2025 08:22, Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget wrote:
> > From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
> >
> > In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14),
> > we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`,
> > but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We
> > have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's
> > add it now, to both commands.
>
> I agree that it would be helpful to have a some rev-list options
> included here but this adds a huge amount of text to the man page which
> comes before the documentation for frequently used options like
> "--continue". I'm not sure all of the new text is relevant to
> cherry-pick and revert. For instance do we need to document --bisect,
> -cherry-mark and --boundary here? I'm not sure the History
> Simplification and Commit Formatting sections are relevant either. There
> are already a bunch of ifdefs in rev-list-options.adoc that change
> what's included depending on which command we're documenting, maybe we
> should add some more for the cherry-pick and revert documentation?

I thought too that the rev-list-options.adoc is probably longer than it needs to be for most of the places where we include it. I wonder if it's worth breaking that inclusion into smaller, more relevant parts?

Full disclosure, if that's the solution we want to go with, it will take much longer for me to address it than for someone else to, although I'm interested.

 - Emily
Show 84 quoted lines
>
> Thanks
>
> Phillip> Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
> > Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
> > ---
> >      cherry-pick: document rev-list options
> >
> >      Ach, sorry for the noise, turns out it touched both revert and
> >      cherry-pick, might as well do the docs for both.
> >
> > Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-git-2042%2Fnasamuffin%2Fcherry-pick-docs-v2
> > Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-git-2042/nasamuffin/cherry-pick-docs-v2
> > Pull-Request: https://github.com/git/git/pull/2042
> >
> > Range-diff vs v1:
> >
> >   1:  fa352ccda08 ! 1:  f41cb4e8abc cherry-pick: document rev-list options
> >       @@ Metadata
> >        Author: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
> >
> >         ## Commit message ##
> >       -    cherry-pick: document rev-list options
> >       +    doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick
> >
> >            In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14),
> >       -    we added a handful of new options to `git cherry-pick`, but did not
> >       -    document them except by example. We have a nice shorthand for adding the
> >       -    rev-list documentation, so let's add it now.
> >       +    we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`,
> >       +    but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We
> >       +    have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's
> >       +    add it now, to both commands.
> >
> >            Reported-by: Andrew Jeffrey <andrew@aj.id.au>
> >            Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
> >       @@ Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc: fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allo
> >         SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
> >         ---------------------
> >         include::sequencer.adoc[]
> >       +
> >       + ## Documentation/git-revert.adoc ##
> >       +@@ Documentation/git-revert.adoc: include::rerere-options.adoc[]
> >       +       configuration variable can be used to enable this option by
> >       +       default.
> >       +
> >       ++include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
> >       +
> >       + SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
> >       + ---------------------
> >
> >
> >   Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc | 2 ++
> >   Documentation/git-revert.adoc      | 1 +
> >   2 files changed, 3 insertions(+)
> >
> > diff --git a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> > index 42b41923d5f..03848aa9f21 100644
> > --- a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> > +++ b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> > @@ -174,6 +174,8 @@ fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allow-empty` are specified.
> >
> >   include::rerere-options.adoc[]
> >
> > +include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
> > +
> >   SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
> >   ---------------------
> >   include::sequencer.adoc[]
> > diff --git a/Documentation/git-revert.adoc b/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
> > index ffba365e639..28827807473 100644
> > --- a/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
> > +++ b/Documentation/git-revert.adoc
> > @@ -122,6 +122,7 @@ include::rerere-options.adoc[]
> >       configuration variable can be used to enable this option by
> >       default.
> >
> > +include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
> >
> >   SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS
> >   ---------------------
> >
> > base-commit: f814da676ae46aac5be0a98b99373a76dee6cedb
>
Junio C Hamano· Aug 27, 2025, 16:14 UTC · re: Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget · lore

Re: [PATCH v2] doc: document rev-list opts in revert, cherry-pick

"Emily Shaffer via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> writes:
Show 7 quoted lines
> From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
>
> In f873a273d1 (revert: accept arbitrary rev-list options, 2010-06-14),
> we added a handful of new options to `git revert` and `git cherry-pick`,
> but did not document them except by example to `cherry-pick` only. We
> have a nice shorthand for adding the rev-list documentation, so let's
> add it now, to both commands.
That's a blast from the past.
Show 10 quoted lines
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> index 42b41923d5f..03848aa9f21 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> +++ b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.adoc
> @@ -174,6 +174,8 @@ fail unless one of `--empty=keep` or `--allow-empty` are specified.
>  
>  include::rerere-options.adoc[]
>  
> +include::rev-list-options.adoc[]
> +

Are there options that rev-list family of commands take that are nonsense in the context of cherry-pick (and revert)?

The rev-list-options.adoc[] file is designed to be included from different places, so for example it omits certain things from appearing in the output. E.g., by doing things like:

    `--ignore-missing`::
            Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as if
            the bad input was not given.
    ifndef::git-rev-list[]
    `--bisect`::
            Pretend as if the bad bisection ref `refs/bisect/bad`
            was listed and as if it was followed by `--not` and the good
            bisection refs `refs/bisect/good-*` on the command
            line.
    endif::git-rev-list[]
and not doing
    :git-rev-list: 1
    include::rev-list-options.adoc[]

we can exclude specific parts of the rev-list-options.adoc from inclusion.

I know that the implementation took a blind^Wstupid route to allow everything, but documenting them for unsuspecting general public would make the harm larger. They wouldn't have even imagined to type

    git cherry-pick --graph master

if they weren't told that the command took such a nonsense option. Have you reviewed what is in rev-list-options.adoc and thought about excluding certain parts when the file is included in either git-cherry-pick.adoc or git-revert.adoc?

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