Git and working on multiple branches

by

There are two solutions not mentioned already that you can use: use a topic branch or use cherry-picking.

Topic branch solution

In the topic branch solution, you switch to branch ‘something’, create a branch to fix a bug e.g. ‘something-bugfix’, merge this branch into ‘something’ (fixing the bug), then merge this branch into ‘experimental’.

$ git checkout -b something-fix something
[edit, commit]
$ git checkout something
$ git merge something-fix
$ git checkout experimental
$ git merge something-fix
[fix conflicts if necessary and commit]

See also Resolving conflicts/dependencies between topic branches early and Never merging back, and perhaps also Committing to a different branch blog posts by Junio C Hamano (git maintainer).

Cherry-picking a bugfix

The cherry-picking solution is useful if you noticed later that the bugfix you created (e.g. on development branch) would be useful also on other branch (e.g. stable branch). In your case you would comit a fix on ‘something’ branch:

$ git checkout something
[edit, edit, edit]
$ git commit
$ git checkout experimental

Then you noticed that fix you comitted in ‘something’ branch should be also on ‘experimenta’ branch. Lets say that this bugfix was commit ‘A’ (e.g. ‘something’ if you didn’t commit anything on top of ‘something’, but it might be e.g. ‘something~2’ or ‘c84fb911’):

$ git checkout experimental
$ git cherry-pick A

(you can use --edit option to git cherry-pick if you want to edit commit message before comitting cherry-picked bugfix).

More Related Contents:

  1. How can I delete all Git branches which have been merged?
  2. What is a tracking branch?
  3. How can I get a list of Git branches, ordered by most recent commit?
  4. Set up git to pull and push all branches
  5. How is a tag different from a branch in Git? Which should I use, here?
  6. Rebasing a branch including all its children
  7. Vendor Branches in Git
  8. View a file in a different Git branch without changing branches
  9. How do I delete all Git branches which have been merged?
  10. Does deleting a branch in git remove it from the history?
  11. Git push: “fatal ‘origin’ does not appear to be a git repository – fatal Could not read from remote repository.”
  12. Commit a file to a Different Branch Without Checkout
  13. How do I force "git pull" to overwrite local files?
  14. How can I see the changes in a Git commit?
  15. Track all remote git branches as local branches
  16. Git cherry pick and datamodel integrity
  17. Sparse checkout in Git 1.7.0?
  18. Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do not have locally
  19. How to convert a normal Git repository to a bare one?
  20. Why do I have to “git push –set-upstream origin “?
  21. unknown option `allow-unrelated-histories’
  22. Remove file from git repository (history)
  23. How to commit my current changes to a different branch in Git [duplicate]
  24. git pull –rebase lost commits after coworker’s git push –force
  25. git-svn: how do I create a new svn branch via git?
  26. How do you fork your own repository on GitHub?
  27. Git: Is there a way to figure out where a commit was cherry-pick’ed from?
  28. Getting started with Version Control System
  29. git branch permissions
  30. Limiting file size in git repository

Leave a Comment