Re: cc/cherry-pick-ff (Re: What's cooking in git.git (Mar 2010, #04; Tue, 16))

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org> writes:

> ... if we implement "git cherry-pick A..B", and if many people 
> start to use it, then perhaps it will make sense for --ff to become the 
> default.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

Think why you are saying A..B, with an explicit "A".

It is because you know it is different from HEAD; otherwise you would have
done "git merge B"---slurp all changes between HEAD..B, which would be
equivalent to "cherry-pick --ff HEAD..B".

As an ingredient for use of scripts that do not want to check (even if
they could) if it is dealing with a corner case in which the commit a
change is being applied to happens to be the commit the change in question
is based on, being able to say --ff would make sense (as your patch series
showed, it helped to lose several lines from the rebase-i implementation).
The end user may not bother to count commits, and being able to ff earlier
parts of "rebase -i HEAD~20" when the first "edit" appears after many
"pick" would help (and that was why "rebase -i" internally had ff logic).

But running cherry-pick as the top-level operation is a conscious act of
"I want to replay the change done by that one", and it would be utterly
confusing if it fast-forwarded by default.  I agree with Jonathan that it
will never be default.