git cherry-pick failing because of merge conflict

Question

I am using git cherry-pick to add specific commit SHAs to a particular branch:

git cherry-pick 12345
error: commit 12345 is a merge but no -m option was given.
fatal: cherry-pick failed

(Pretend 12345 is a commit SHA.)

I've tried several other variations but they all fail:

git cherry-pick 12345 -m
git cherry-pick -m 12345
etc.

Not sure how to interpret the error message or figure out what the fix is. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Yes, the sequence of commits passed to git cherry-pick indeed matters.

Consider your first commit A introduced a new line, and the next commit B modified the same line. if the commits are picked in the wrong order, then commit B has nothing to patch, even if that didn't fail, then commit A would add the un-patched line back, probably not what you want, right?

And regarding merge commits, if it introduced changes, then it must be included, too.

Also, usually you don't pass a long list of commits to git cherry-pick , you can use revision range syntax to specify a series of commits, please refer to the EXAMPLES section in the manual: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-cherry-pick