Cleaning up a messy branch
Let’s say you have a long-lived git branch. Most of the changes should be merged back to main, but some of the changes were already cherry-picked from main, and some of the changes shouldn’t be put onto main at all. How do you review the branch and merge it?
Here’s a diagram of a simple example. The main branch at the top has seven commits. Beneath that is our work branch with three commits, of the three different kinds: W is important work we need to end up on main, M is a commit we cherry-picked from main, and X is a temporary tweak that we don’t want to end up on main:
If we make a pull request from our work branch, GitHub will show a diff that includes all three commits W, M, and X. It was a surprise to me that M was included: it’s not a change that will happen if we merge the work branch, because M is already on main. GitHub doesn’t show you a diff between your branch and main, it shows the diff since your branch diverged from main: it shows all of the commits on your branch. This makes it hard to assess what a merge will do if the branch has cherry-picked commits.
And of course the pull request diff includes X, since that would be a change to main if we merge the work branch. But we don’t want X in the merge, and we don’t want to be distracted by M when reviewing the pull request. What should we do?
