Creation of Merge Request in GitLab fails

Question

I migrated my existing sources from Microsoft SourceSafe to GitLab.

Now I have two branches master and release.

I created a third branch feature off master and committed and pushed this branch.

Afterwards, I created a new merge request, which got accepted and merged feature into master without conflicts. Now I want to cherry-pick this merge request into release which is 15 commits behind and 12 commits ahead to master.

When creating this merge request, I get an error saying "Sorry, we cannot cherry-pick this merge request automatically.

This merge request may already have been cherry-picked, or a more recent commit may have updated some of its content." and no merge request is created. This merge request isn't already cherry-picked as it is the first cherry pick ever in this repository and there also isn't a more recent commit that updated this file.

Additionally, GitLab won't show any entries related to my error in the internal log.

I want GitLab to create a merge request and let me resolve possible conflicts in the web interface. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Usually in this case, create a new branch for your release, cherry pick to that branch, and then push that up as a separate merge request.

That's how we handle our release process when our release and main diverge from each other. It gets really obvious when I go on one of my refactoring sprees minutes after we branch off release. :D

Because of how Git works and the acyclic graph, you can't just reuse a commit, you basically have to manually create an identical one and push them up since the previous commits of release differ than master.