Re: [PATCH] patch-ids: handle duplicate hashmap entries

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

Right. There's definitely a question of whether --cherry-pick is the
most useful thing in such a situation, but the current behavior was
simply broken. It did not behave as advertised, and it treated one side
of the history different from the other. So whether we want to do
anything else to help that case, I think this at least makes
--cherry-pick sane. :)

Yes; I think "sane" does not always equal to "useful", though ;-)

Here are two related histories to think about.
...
I suspect for most operations we care less about "remove all
cherry-picks from both sides", but rather "give me one side, omitting
commits that are already on the other side" (because you want to rebase
or cherry-pick some subset).

Yes again.  It means "--cherry-pick" inherently is not symmetric.
One side is the reference side (i.e. mainline), and the goal is to
remove from the other side what is in the reference side.

What we are seeing in this discussion is that "--cherry-pick" and
symmetric difference do not conceptually play well together.

But the behaviour with the patch makes the most sense when
cherry-pick is applied to a symmetric difference (provided that
doing so makes sense in the first place, that is).