Cherrypicking (was Re: ...)

Andrew Cowie andrew at operationaldynamics.com
Wed Nov 14 11:04:56 GMT 2007


On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 11:09 +0100, Erik Bågfors wrote:
> I know that [cherrypicking] is a deal-breaker for some people.

Speaking personally it's not so much that it's a deal-breaker as it is
that the lack of it makes my job as project maintainer a real pain in
the ass.

Of course, not everyone means the same thing by cherrypick, which
complicates matters.

Here we go with the revision is not a changeset thing again, but what
I'm trying to do is pull the changes caused by a revision(or range
thereof) from some other branch into this one.

It comes up a LOT for us - particularly when we have a major development
branch running and want to pull a number of (orthogonal) features out of
it so they can be published in the 'mainline' while development
continues. It also happens a lot when much of a contribution is worthy
of being accepted to 'mainline' but not all. I'd far rather "cherry
pick" the good stuff rather than committing something that
destroys-by-reverting the other work.

It seems really weird to me that I can't pull "those revisions" and if I
do the whole `bzr merge --force ../other/filename` thing it doesn't
import the changelog entries, or the author credit, or any of that
stuff.

It really does come back to the meaning of revision. To me, an outsider,
a revision **LOOKS** like a changeset. When you commit something you're
committing the patch it represents. When you examine it with `bzr viz`
or whatever you see it as patch. The changelog entry for that revision
describes the *change* ... and yet "revision" turns out to be a state
marker, not the change.

Weird.

I know about these things and have for a while and I *still* trip over
it all the time. To be honest, I'd have to say that
revision-as-state-marker doesn't do much for me as a user of Bazaar; and
in any case that's what those revnos are for, right? Since I'm thinking
"changes", revisions not being exposed as such smacks of "internals
leaking into the UI"

But that's just me.

AfC
Sydney
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