If your cherry-pick doesn’t run into conflicts why would your merge? You don’t need to merge to master until you’re done but you should merge from master to your feature branch regularly to keep it updated.
(I’m also a fan of rebasing; but I also like to land commits that perform a logical and separable chunk of work, because I like history to have decent narrative flow.)
That is absolutely not what rebasing does. Rebasing rewrites the commit history, cherry picking commits then doing a normal merge does not rewrite any history.
I’m sorry but that’s incorrect. “Rewriting the commit history” is not possible in git, since commits are immutable. What rebase actually does is reapply each commit between upstream and head on top of upstream, and then reset the current branch to the last commit applied (This is by default, assuming no interactive rebase and other advanced uses). But don’t take my word for it, just read the manual. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rebase
“Reapply” is rewriting it on the other branch. The branch you are rebasing to now has a one or multiple commits that do not represent real history. Only the very last commit on the branch is actually what the user rebasing has on their computer.
What you do is create a third branch off master, cherry pick the commits from the feature branch, and merge in the third branch. So much easier.
If your cherry-pick doesn’t run into conflicts why would your merge? You don’t need to merge to master until you’re done but you should merge from master to your feature branch regularly to keep it updated.
That’s called rebasing
for some reason it’s easier than normal rebasing though
Have you tried interactive rebase (rebase -i)? I find it very useful
Yeah, but then you deal with merge conflicts
You can get merge conflicts in cherry picks too, it’s the same process.
rerere is a lifesaver here.
(I’m also a fan of rebasing; but I also like to land commits that perform a logical and separable chunk of work, because I like history to have decent narrative flow.)
That is absolutely not what rebasing does. Rebasing rewrites the commit history, cherry picking commits then doing a normal merge does not rewrite any history.
I’m sorry but that’s incorrect. “Rewriting the commit history” is not possible in git, since commits are immutable. What rebase actually does is reapply each commit between upstream and head on top of upstream, and then reset the current branch to the last commit applied (This is by default, assuming no interactive rebase and other advanced uses). But don’t take my word for it, just read the manual. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rebase
“Reapply” is rewriting it on the other branch. The branch you are rebasing to now has a one or multiple commits that do not represent real history. Only the very last commit on the branch is actually what the user rebasing has on their computer.
Cherry picking also rewrites the commits. This is equivalent to rebasing:
git branch -f orig_head git reset target git cherry-pick ..orig_head