There are plenty of StackOverflow questions and blog posts about the error message that you get when you use git cherry-pick or git revert on a merge commit without specifying the -m option. Many people don't seem to understand what the error message means, or why they even get an error in the first place. The answers to these questions patiently explain what the error means and why the -m option is necessary. Many of them contain example scenarios; but I haven't seen a single one that doesn't use -m1 to illustrate the usage. I have two questions: - What are real-world scenarios where you would use a mainline number other than 1? I could only come up with a single example myself, which is that you have a topic branch, and right before merging it back to main, you merge main into the topic branch; and then you merge it to main with a fast-forward merge. If you then want to cherry-pick or revert that topic, you'd have to use -m2 on that last merge from main. Any other examples? - Wouldn't it make sense to default to -m1 when no -m option is given? It seems that this would do the expected thing in the vast majority of cases. For the GUI client that I'm co-maintaining (lazygit), I'm actually considering going so far as to not providing a choice at all, and always using -m1. I'm not fully decided yet if that's a good idea, but it seems that most people expect this, most of the time. I'm probably missing something though, but what? -Stefan
