Part 2

Hi folks

Cherry-picks

One of the first things I needed to do with my repository is to do cherry-picks from dev into prod branch.

Let’s say we want to cherry-pick commit with revision r1234 from dev branch

In svn you just do

svn merge -c 1234 ^/branches/dev

And besides the cherry-pick itself, it will also update metadata, namely svn:mergeinfo property. And you will try to cherry-pick the same commit again, it will be a no-op.

Let’s say r1234 corresponds to the commit abcdef

If we do

git cherry-pick -x abcdef git svn dcommit

svn:mergeinfo is not updated. Note that I even added -x which adds (cherry-picked from …) into a commit message.

So git-svn does not handle these cherry-picks automatically.

The solution that I found is to use —mergeinfo parameter

git cherry-pick -x abcdef
git svn dcommit --mergeinfo="/branches/dev:1234"

But the next gotcha will occur when you perform the next cherry-pick

Let’s say you want to cherry-pick another commit r5678 with commit hash defabc

If you just do

git cherry-pick -x defabc
git svn dcommit --mergeinfo="/branches/dev:5678"

The result will be wrong, because result value of the svn:mergeinfo will be “/branches/dev:5678” instead of “/branches/dev:1234,5678”

So this means that every time we do a cherry-pick we have to manually append new commits to the mergeinfo

git cherry-pick -x defabc
git svn dcommit --mergeinfo="/branches/dev:1234,5678"

It’s a bit inconvenient. I did not find an easy way to script it.

So every time you are going to dcommit cherry-picks you’ll have to extract existing svn:mergeinfo values

svn propget svn:mergeinfo https://my-svn-repo-url.com/branches/prod

In case if you cherry-picked from different branches, the command above will return several lines

/branches/dev:1234,5678 /branches/some-other-branch:2345,6789

and then you have to join these lines with a space and insert a cherry-picked revision

git svn dcommit --mergeinfo="/branches/dev:1234,5678,9012 /branches/some-other-branch:2345,6789"

This inconvenience with cherry-picks and git-svn annoyed me very much so I decided to try other techniques such as SubGit and SmartGit. Let’s talk about them next time…

Please stay tuned

Part 4