Small commits allow for big wins.
Something that I have been using a lot lately is GIT's cherry-pick command. I find the command very useful, and it saves me bunches of time. Here is a quick lesson on what it does and an example use case.
What is GIT cherry-pick? man page
Git cherry-pick allows you to merge a single commit from one branch into another. To use the cherry-pick command follow these steps:
- Check out the branch into which you want to merge the commit. (E.g.: git checkout master)
- Identify the commit hash through your favorite method. You can use git log, a GUI tool such as sourcetree or tower, or if you use GitHub or BitBucket you can use their interface. In SWS we use GitHub, so I tend to use that method often. With GitHub you can find the commit hash on the commit list page or on the individual commit page itself. See the screenshots below.
- Pick'em! eg: git cherry-pick 9638d99c89a92350ad2f205f47af24b81ac39a64
- If there is a merge conflict you will have to resolve that with your favorite merge tool, but otherwise you have now successfully pulled in the work from the other branch.
Why would I use this?
That is a good question. Why would you cherry-pick instead of just merging one branch into the other? The short answer is that you cherry-pick when a full branch merge is not possible due to incompatible versions or simply because you do not want everything in the other branch.
A common use case for Drupal module maintainers is when a security vulnerability has been identified and fixed in a Drupal version number and has to be applied to others. For example, if a security fix has been found in the Drupal 6 version of the stanford_events module, then that fix may apply to the Drupal 7 version. Instead of having the developer apply the change manually to the Drupal 7 version that developer can use Git cherry-pick for commit and carry on.
How to find the commit hash on GitHub:
