Git create branch from range of previous commits?

Question

I have a bunch of commits for an OS project and I want to pull out just the last say 20 commits into another branch so I can pull request.

How could I do this? The reason being is I have maybe 150 commits, but most of those are for a much larger contribute, which isn't ready yet. But the next version is being released soon.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can do this with cherry-pick. If your history of long_branch looks like this:

A-B  <-- master    \     C-D-E-F-G-H  <-- long_branch 

and you want to move the contents of, say, F through H to a different branch, say, short_branch, which is based off of master:

git checkout master -b short_branch 

which gives

A-B  <-- master, short_branch    \     C-D-E-F-G-H  <-- long_branch 

then... (note that the commit range is E..H; the left side is non-inclusive for the range)

git cherry-pick E..H 

which gives:

    F'-G'-H'  <-- short_branch    / A-B  <-- master    \     C-D-E-F-G-H  <-- long_branch 

Note that I'm referring to the new commits as F', G', H' - this is because while they will contain the same effective changes as F, G, and H, they won't be the actual same commits (due to different parents + commit times).