On 2009.11.29 18:41:35 +0100, Peter Weseloh wrote: > > What's unusual there is that you merged from Mainline to Feature_A. > > Usually, the history would look like this: > > > > o--o--o Release_1.0 > > / \ \ > > o-o-o--o--o-o-o-o-o-o---o--o Mainline > > \ / > > F1-----F2------F3 Feature_A > > > > And then you could easily use rebase to get the job done. > > But on the other hand the intermediate merges from the Mainline make for > much simpler merges, right?. > If merging is done only when Feature_A is ready it might become a real pain. That's usually more often true with CVS or SVN than with git, but ... > It might take several month to complete it and the mainline might have > changed a lot. ... over such a long timeframe, yes, things might become ugly. OTOH such a long timeframe might also mean that the topic branch actually does too much. Splitting such a large thing into more manageable pieces would help there, as you could merge completed topic branch to your mainline branch earlier and more often. > > Had you known beforehand that Feature_A is a candidate for backporting, > > you would have even branch from an older commit like this: > > > > o--o--o Release_1.0 > > / \ \ > > o-o-o--o--o-o-o-o-o-o---o--o Mainline > > \ / > > F1--------F2-------F3 Feature_A > > > > Then you could easily merge Feature_A to Release_1.0 as well, without > > merging anything unrelated. > > > > But that's just for the future... > > > Yes, sure. If I would know the future already today I would not need to do > any coding anymore :-) I meant something like "I just said that, so you can avoid problems in the future" ;-) But yeah, knowing beforehand that things should go into a maintenance branch isn't common, unless it's about a bugfix. > > Given you current history, you could use format-patch + am like this: > > > > git format-patch --stdout --first-parent Mainline..Feature_A > fa.mbox > > git checkout Release_1.0 > > git am -3 fa.mbox > > > > The --first-parent options make it follow the first parent of the merge > > commits only, so the whole stuff on the Mainline branch is ignored. And > > you just get F1, F2 and F3 in fa.mbox, which you then apply using am. > > > > > Ah, great! I played with format-patch + am but missed the '--first-parent' > option. I will give it a try. Thanks a lot! Well, it's a rev-list option, which might work by accident. Junio recently said that the fact that format-patch accepts path limiting is by accident, might be true for --first-parent as well... No clue. Junio? Björn -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html