Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Sergey Organov <sorganov@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >>> This kind of operation produces a new commit, so there's no such >>> thing as a partial revert or partial cherry-pick, at least in >>> terms of "things Git can do by itself". But we, as humans writing >>> programs, wish to *achieve* such things. >> >> So, why Git can't help us achieving it by supporting paths limiting in >> (all) merge operations? There seems to be no absolute obstacles, just a >> luck of support. > > I think there is no fundamental reason to forbid an optional > pathspec to "cherry-pick" and "revert", given that a commit that > results from either "git cherry-pick" or "git revert" is called a > "cherry-pick" or a "revert" merely by convention and there is no > tool-level support to treat them any specially at merge or rebase > time [*1*]. It would make it harder to design tool-level support > for full cherry-picks or reverts, but that is a problem for future > generation, not ours ;-) Allowing pathspec to "merge" and recording > the result as a merge of two (or more) parents is an absolute no-no > but that is not what we are discussing. If I got this right, you believe that "git merge" should never have support for "partial merges", whereas it makes sense for cherry-pick and revert? If so, I disagree. There is no reason for Git to strictly prevent me from using the feature specifically in "git merge" (once it's otherwise implemented), provided I do mean it and didn't do it by mistake. Please notice that I can do it right now already (and I did a few times), only with a more pain than necessary, and I don't see why this pain is to be preserved (provided we do have the feature implemented in the future). Besides, "git merge" is only a helper, and it'd be an improvement if it'll be capable to help in more cases. [...] > But I do not think Chris meant to say "you should not expect such a > feature"; what we heard was a reasonable explanation of how the > current world works, and I do not see a reason to react strongly to > such a statement as if you were unreasonably forbidden from doing > something sensible. Nice, so I figure I may allow myself to still keep a weak hope for the feature, and thus stop being forbidden, even if not unreasonably, from doing something sensible. ;-) Thanks, -- Sergey Organov
