Git Merge (merge from one branch to another)

Question

I have two branch lets say one branch is branch_one and second one is branch_two .

Now both branches have been used paralleled for different set of developments.

Now, I want to merge some commits from branch_two to branch_one , but based on start of time.

I mean branch_two has around 100 commits we want to merge from 51 commit on-wards on branch_one .

Answer 1

Description

If you do not want to merge all changes from one branch to another (using git merge ), you can cherry-pick some of the commits (either single commits or multiple commits at once). See cherry-pick documentation here or this reply , that elaborates on cherry-picking a range of commits.

As far as I know, there is no direct option to directly merge commits from a certain date, but you can just use the method described here to find the commit created on a certain day and use that commit as the start commit for your cherry pick.

Be aware, however, that cherry-picking does apply the picked commits' changes, but creates new commits. Thus, when you ever merge branch_one and branch_two in the future, you will have multiple commits introducing the same changes.

Example

On branch_two:

git log --after="2013-11-12 00:00" --before="2013-11-12 23:59"

Output:

commit 5f3be6775d78k28ee0e4f55c05ec897de3f02360
Author: someone <some@one.com>
Date:   Wed Mar 22 17:10:48 2017 +0100

    Commit message

On branch_one:

git cherry-pick 5f3be6775d78k28ee0e4f55c05ec897de3f02360~1..<id of the latest commit on branch_two>

Edit: Note the ~1 behind the first commits' id. This is necessary, since cherry picking multiple commits will

[...] not cherry-pick A, but rather everything after A up to and including B. – JB Rainsberger

See here .

Answer 2

You can use git format-patch command

git format-patch -50 -o <output-directory> 

It will generate separate patch file for each commit.
And then apply the patch to branch one