Cherry pickingEdit

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"Cherry picking" is the practice of taking a specific change from one branch of development and merging it into another. It is different from a wholesale merge of one branch into another (where all changes are merged). Cherry picking is easier with a version control system like SVK that supports automatic merge tracking than with a system that doesn’t, like Subversion.

For cherry picking to be effective you need to make sure that there are actually "cherries" to be picked; that is, you need to have one changeset per meaningful change: if you have more than one meaningful change in a single changeset then you are no longer free to cherry pick only one of those changes.

In practice, this means that you should be disciplined about your commits: one commit per meaningful change.

  • Prior to committing always revise your working copy using svk status and svk diff (if you are using SVK) or svn status/svn diff (if using Subversion).
  • If multiple files have changes, commit them in two or more separate commits if necessary to keep meaningful changes appropriately grouped.
  • Use microbranches and branches to keep tasks and streams of development separate; this will make your changes naturally lean towards being meaningfully grouped.
  • In cases where multiple, unrelated changes have been made to a file, if you are using SVK you can use the --interactive switch to selectively commit chunks of a given file.

See also