Re: Commiting changes onto more than one branch

On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Mike Jarmy wrote:

My question is this:  How do I manage a checkin for a bugfix that
affects, say, only branches v3, v4, and v5?

Suppose that I checkout the v3 branch, and fix the bug by editing
several different files.  (Lets assume for now that the files in
question have not diverged between any of the 3 branches, even though
tons of other files have changed).  How do I commit the bugfix into
all of v3, v4 and v5?  Clearly, merging the branches together would be
bad.  So I think what I should do is perform 3 different commits, but
I'm not quite sure how to juggle the git index (or stash or whatever)
to accomplish this.  This may be a really obvious question, but I'm a
confused git newbie.

Besides what other people have already suggested, you might simply elect 
to use 'git cherry-pick' on the v4 and v5 branches to copy the fix from 
the v3 branch.

Also, even though I may need to do 3 commits, it would be nice if the
commits were related together in some way, since in a sense they
represent only one action (namely, fixing the bug).  Is there a way to
do that, so that its clear in gitk that it was really one unified
thing? 

You can use the -x argument with 'git cherry-pick'.  This won't create a 
formal history graph but at least the commit log will record a reference 
to the original fix.


Nicolas