Get cherry-pick to work across file renames
Making cherry-pick work across file renames
Recently I need to port over some changes using cherry-pick and that usually works fine without any issues (except for occasional conflicts), but this time the actual file foo.cc was renamed to bar.cc. In such case git cherry-pick simply gives up and simply tells you the old file you are changing has been deleted. As far as I can tell there isn’t a good way to resolve the conflict.
There are a couple of ways to address this issue. But the easiest way I found is to just rename the file back to the original name where you had made the change on, in order to make git happy. Once that’s done, cherry-picking would work fine as usual. Now just rename the file back to the ‘new’ name. Squash the change.
This can be illustrated in following example - assuming:
- Your commit modifies foo.cc
- In the target branch (that you want to cherry-pick) renames foo.cc to bar.cc
# Create the target branch as usual
git checkout -b your-target-branch
# Rename bar.cc back to foo.cc to make git cherry-pick happy
git mv bar.cc foo.cc
git commit -m "Make git happy"
# Cherry-pick as usual
git cherry-pick -x <commit>
# Rename it back
git mv foo.cc bar.cc
git commit -m "Rename back"
# Squash the 3 commits into one
git rebase -i HEAD~3
In the rebase file, you’ll see:
pick 95be80db682 Make git happy
pick 3d74c6c9e13 Cherry-pick commit blah
pick 238e3c51354 Rename back
Change to:
pick 95be80db682 Make git happy
s 3d74c6c9e13 Cherry-pick commit blah
s 238e3c51354 Rename back
Here s means squash with previous commit.
Just remember in commit message deleting the first and third unrelated commit.
And now you are all set!
