Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))

Linus Torvalds
2008-02-13T01:01:00Z

On Wed, 13 Feb 2008, Al Viro wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 07:16:50PM -0500, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > > Ahem... Use of git-cherry-pick preserves commit information just fine.
> >
> > Not by default, at least (note they said "commiters", not "authors"):
>
> That's why you give it -r.

Hmm. "-r" is a no-op to git-cherry-pick.

And even if you thought it should preserve committer information, it
really _really_ shouldn't. You're creating a new commit, you're the new
committer. The old committer is meaningless. It doesn't matter at all if
you try to keep the old committer information (which you can do by faking
GIT_COMMITER_NAME¦EMAIL): you're simply just _lying_ at that point. The
original committer has a different commit in his tree, and if you try to
claim that your cherry-picked commit is his, you're only doing everybody a
disservice.

If you meant using "-x", then yes, that retains the actual pointer to the
original commit, but it's not the default, because it shouldn't be used
unless you plan to carry both around on purpose (ie it's mainly useful for
"maintain a stable branch that has commits cherry-picked from mainline"
kinds of things).

Linus