Why does `git cherry-pick --allow-empty` have no effect?

Question

If I cherry-pick a commit which makes no changes, but I want it to commit anyways (so that the audit trail of commits is consistent with another project), I get the message:

$ git cherry-pick 696abcb
...
nothing to commit, working directory clean
The previous cherry-pick is now empty, possibly due to conflict resolution.
If you wish to commit it anyway, use:

     git commit --allow-empty

According to the man pages, I can use cherry-pick with --allow-empty. But this results in the same message:

$ git cherry-pick --allow-empty 696abcb

(same message as above)

Is this a bug? Am I completely misunderstanding the point of this option?

Answer 1

With Git 2.22 (Q2 2019), you won't have to run git commit --allow-empty.
"git cherry-pick --options A..B", after giving control back to the user to ask help resolving a conflicted step, did not honor the options it originally received, which has been corrected.

See commit 6860ce5, commit 36b0503, commit f59199d (13 Mar 2019) by Phillip Wood (phillipwood).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit d2dba18, 25 Apr 2019)}

cherry-pick --continue: remember options

Remember --allow-empty, --allow-empty-message and --keep-redundant-commits when cherry-pick stops for a conflict resolution.

Answer 2

Since there's nothing to cherry-pick, there's no work that can be done. The only possible thing that you could do is create an empty commit. It's not instructing you to run git cherry-pick --allow-empty, instead it's instructing you to run:

git commit --allow-empty

Note that's the commit command. git will not, by default, create commits with no changes in them.

(git questions the value of creating an empty commit, just to include a commit message in your history - as do I, to be frank - but if you need it for auditing, then this is the way to do it.)