Question

Say I have a git repository and I’ve been working on master, can I retroactively create a branch. For example:

A – B – C – A1 – D – A2 – E

I want to make it look like this:

A - A1 - A2    \           \    B - C - D - E 

The specific use case is when I’ve cherry-picked a bunch of commits into an old version branch and it needs to go into multiple older versions and I don’t want to repeat the cherry-pick on all those revision.

Essentially it’s something that would have been good as a feature or topic branch in the first place but wasn’t created like that.

Answer 1

Of course you can. (With Git there isn’t much than you can’t do anyway. 🙂

git checkout -b new-branch hash-of-A git cherry-pick hash-of-A1 git cherry-pick hash-of-A2 

This will create a new branch, starting from the commit A. Afterwards you go back to the same commit again, creating another branch:

git checkout -b new-branch2 hash-of-A git cherry-pick hash-of-B git cherry-pick hash-of-C git cherry-pick hash-of-D git cherry-pick hash-of-E git merge new-branch 

Now you simply have to merge new-branch and new-branch2 to get the structure you want and drop your old branch.

Of course what Dustin said still holds: the hashes of the commits will change so you should only do that if you haven’t published your changes yet.