git partial merge, not whole branch

Question

I've read about some tricks with merge in Git: merging public and private branches while while keeping certain files intact in both branches and others and not found a solution.

In my case I'm feeling need to do opposite merge strategy. In parallel development I have to keep some files same across the arbitrary branches. From other side I do not want to do squash or no-commit merge, while difference are significant and could break current state of testing branch.

What I want something like

git checkout testing

git merge config.xml -b development or git merge config\*.xml -b development

I guess this is like git merge-files ... command, but second file delivered from the branch, not from the filesystem. Is it possible? or may be there is a kind of workaround? submodules? attributes?

Thanks

Answer 1

There are a couple things you can do.

One, you can cherry-pick the changes you want, which applies only a single commit. For example, if there's a change that only touches config.xml, you can cherry-pick it with

$ git cherry-pick $COMMIT_ID_YOU_WANT 

You could also just grab config.xml from the development branch:

$ git checkout testing $ git checkout development -- config.xml 

That'll get you the same version of config.xml that exists in the development branch, but note that it won't pull in the history of changes to the file.

Answer 2

Basically you can all read after here: http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0701/37964.html

In short, if you just want to apply changes made by a certain range of commits (this can as well be only a single commit), made to only a subset of files then do:

git diff commit1..commit2 filepattern | git apply --index && git commit