I'm not sure how to merge a topic branch onto multiple branches
without conflicts or unwanted changes. My workflow probably isn't
ideal, but I often run into cases like this and wondered if there's a
way to solve it with git.
We have a "future" branch for new development. I wanted to add a new
feature so I branched from "future" to create a branch named
"feature". I completed the work, but now they've decided they need
that on two older branches. It looks like this:
future o-o-o-o-o-o-o
\ \ \
1.2 o-o-o \
\ \
1.1 o-o-o \
\
feature o-o-o
a b c
I've read I should have started from the oldest common denominator
branch that I might ever want, but at the time I created the branch,
"future" was it because we thought 1.1 and 1.2 were locked down and
not going to add new features. But things change and I need to roll my
feature into 1.1 and 1.2.
What's the best way to merge changes on the "feature" branch into the
1.1 and 1.2 branches? If I try to checkout 1.1 then 'git merge
feature', it (obviously) merges in a bunch of changes from "future"
that I don't want (and has a bunch of conflicts). I also tried just
cherry-picking commits a, b, and c from the "feature" branch. That
mostly worked, but there were some surprising conflicts. Text that had
been inserted into a couple files (which had been untouched in 1.1 and
1.2) caused a conflict when it seemed like it should have just added
the lines without conflict. I realize it's difficult to know why it
conflicted without seeing the changes, but I'm just asking in a more
general way how I should be doing merges like this.
Is cherry-picking the best way? It seems pretty tedious because I have
to do each commit in reverse order (although I could script it). I was
hoping there was a way to say "apply all the changes from when
"feature" branched up to its tip". I would also like to preserve the
commit history rather than just making making one big commit of all
the changes.
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