Git: Advisory for cherry-picks to production branches

We often have a separate production branch that lags a bit behind the more cutting edge main branch. Sometimes you want to move some, but not all commits from main to production. This can be done with a git cherry-pick.

However, this may lead to considerable pain later, since git does not understand the commits are actually "the same". Hazards are unnecessary and hard to resolve conflicts as well as incorrect auto-merges.

In order to avoid this, always merge the production branch back to the main after the cherry-pick. Even though this will make the cherry-picked commits appear twice in main, both branches will now have a common base again.

So the full workflow to move the AWESOME_COMMIT_SHA1 to production is:

git checkout production
git cherry-pick AWESOME_COMMIT_SHA1
git checkout main
git merge production

To make your future life easier, choose a slightly more verbose merge commit message than the default:

Merge branch 'production' after cherry-picking AWESOME FEATURE