Cherry pick a range of commits

I just recently learned that you can actually cherry pick a range of commits instead of just a single commit:

git cherry-pick c1..c3

The above is using the two-dot range notation (..).

I was a bit surprised by this because I thought that this was the purpose of rebase --onto — to take a series of commits and apply them one at a time on top of some other commit.

Turns out that they both essentially do the same thing (for each commit they call merge-base under the hood and apply a 3-way merge though you can also think of rebase as a series of cherry picks) but one can be more convenient than the other depending on what you’re doing or how you prefer to think of the operation.

Cherry-pick is more convenient if you want to take a series of commits from some other branch and apply them onto the current branch.

Rebase is more convenient if you want to take the current branch and apply it on top of some other branch. And with the --onto parameter you can change the base or “parent branch”. This is a bit harder to wrap your head around extremely powerful.

For example given the following:

                        H---I---J topicB
                        /
              E---F---G  topicA
              /
A---B---C---D  main

If you run git rebase --onto master topicA topicB then you end up with:

              H'--I'--J'  topicB
            /
            | E---F---G  topicA
            |/
A---B---C---D  main

which is handy if you started working on topicB and thought you were branched off of main instead of topicA or if topicA got merged or squashed from under you. This SO answer does a great job explaining --onto.

Just remember: git rebase --onto <newparent> <oldparent> <until>

To accomplish the same with cherry-pick would require something like:

git checkout main
git branch -b temp # create a new temp branch and switch to it
git cherry-pick topicA..topicB
git checkout topicB
git reset --hard temp # topicB is now updated to match temp
git branch --delete temp