Git – Why aren’t there cherry-pick requests

dvcsgitpull-requests

One disadvantage to pull requests (aka merge requests) is lots and lots of merge commits.

It's not the worst thing, but it does clutter the commit logs, and make for lots of unnecessary non-sequential history.

A - C - E - G
   /   /   /
  B   D   F

What I think would be better is to cherry-pick the commits.

A - B' - D' - F'

Of course I can do that myself, but one of the advantages in a pull request system like Github, Bitbucket, Stash, or Gerrit is the ability to do this through the interface, immediately following a review of the changes. And doing that manually wouldn't show the pull request as accepted in the UI.

Why don't pull request tools offer "cherry-pick requests"?

I understand the advantages of merges and non-sequential history in the general case. (Otherwise, I'd be using SVN.) I am specifically taking about one or two commit changes from transient branches. (Many tools even help you delete the branch right after merging.) A one-commit change is probably the most common case for pull requests.

Best Answer

The thing about pull requests is that it makes known that there are changes that someone wants to bring into the project.

If the owner/maintainer wants to cherry pick parts of the pull request, they can do that from that pull request.

And just because there is a pull request does not mean that the maintainer is not allowed, or incapable, of doing a rebase.

So this is indicative of a style that may be wanted in the history.

You can always display the history without the merge history, or even the other way around.

  • git log --merges
  • git log --no-merges

So it boils down to, I think:

  1. The project owner wanting to enforce, or not, a certain style of history
  2. The fact that you can get either set of information easily from Git itself, regardless.

You also mention that "A one-commit change is probably the most common case for pull requests" but I am not sure about that.

For one, the number of commits may be unknown due to the developers habits of doing micro-commits and then rebasing them. Also, it is common for me to see project owners asking for those commits to be squashed in the CONTRIBUTING.txt file, or other communication.

Edit: Of course, I can't answer the question of why doesn't X, Y and Z companies do something. Not sure anyone can, except for those entities.

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