Alternatives to cherry-picking

Question

We have a master and a production branch. The master branch contains current developments while the production branch contains the stuff that is running on the server. From time to time, there is an important bugfix that has to be applied to both branches.

Currently we are just cherry-picking the commit after creating it on the master branch. But this sometimes creates merge conflicts when we are merging the branches. Are there alternatives?

Answer 1

You can create a new branch (let's call it bugfix-a) at the merge base of master and production

git checkout -b bugfix-a $(git merge-base master production)

Apply your bugfix in that branch

>>/path/to/file echo 'this fixes the bug'
git add /path/to/file
git commit -m 'important bugfix'

Then, merge this new branch to both master and production:

git checkout master
git merge bugfix-a
git checkout production
git merge bugfix-a

That way you should be able to merge master and production at a later date and Git will be clever enough to figure out which commits to pick.

(Monotone – yes, it's not Git – calls this workflow daggy fixes)

Answer 2

Create a separate branch for each hotfix, and merge it into both your development branch and your production branch.

The gitflow model works really well in general, and I'd recommend checking this out: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Your master branch is analogous to their develop branch, and your production branch is analogous to their master

Answer 3

You could use Gitflow. I think the 'hotfix' handles your scenario.