Re: [BUG] cherry-pick ignores some arguments

[Yann Dirson <dirson@bertin.fr>]

On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:29:49 +0200 Carlos Martín Nieto <cmn@elego.de> wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-06-14 at 11:44 +0200, Yann Dirson wrote:
> > Hello list,
> > 
> > I just did a "git cherry-pick AAA BBB..CCC" using 1.7.10.3, and was surprised
> > that only the BBB..CCC range got picked - AAA was silently ignored.
> > 
> 
> There is no way to know whether this is a bug without knowing how AAA,
> BBB and ccc are related? From the names, can we assume that AAA is a
> (grand)parent of BBB? If that is the case, cherry-pick is behaving as
> expected.
>
> See the DESCRIPTION in http://git-scm.com/docs/git-rev-list for further
> explanation, but the short of the story is that the second argument told
> it to ignore any commit before BBB, so AAA is not in the list of commits
> to be applied.

OK, this is exactly the case.  Looking back at the cherry-pick manpage, I'd say that
what confused me is the implicit --no-walk: the standard "git cherry-pick AAA" does
not look like a rev-list spec at all!

At least for this command, it would seem more natural (to me at least) to take
each arg one by one and feed it to "rev-list --no-walk" or similar.  Maybe some
special rev-list flag could trigger such a particular behaviour, pretty much like
what --no-walk does ?


Another orthogonal UI issue I see, is that rev-list could be more user-friendly to warn
the user when one element of a rev list is ignored because of another one.  Not sure
whether this would be useful for all explicit rev lists specified by the user - maybe a
config var and associated option would be needed too.

-- 
Yann Dirson - Bertin Technologies