Adventures in cherry-picking

[John Thacker <johnthacker () gmail com>]

Right now, cherry-picking via the GitLab GUI seems pretty broken. It
appends to the commit message some informative text[1] like:

"

(cherry picked from commit 273eb06390821597d632606587ad79a8e152e122)"

Which is reasonably helpful enough, but adds the two blank lines, not just
one[2], in recent cases I've tested. The extra blank line causes it to fail
the "git stripspace" check in tools/validate.commit.py and thus fail the
pipelines. There's no way around this from the GUI, since the commit
message is automatically created. Changing the merge request message
doesn't affect the commit itself; the cherry-picked branch can be pulled
and altered on the command line, but one might as well just use the CLI for
all of the cherry-picking instead of GitLab's GUI.

Checking, I see that this has hit other people as well:

https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/merge_requests/695

Another irritating thing I have found with cherry-picking into multiple
branches (e.g., release-3.4 and master-3.2) from the original wireshark
repository is that GitLab automatically names cherry-pick branches using
only the commit name but not the target branch.[3]

What's worse is that if I create a cherry pick branch for release-3.4, and
then immediately go back to the same commit in wireshark master and try to
create a cherry-pick branch for master-3.2, I get an error in the GUI like:

"A branch called 'cherry-pick-e42cc671' already exists. Switch to that
branch in order to make changes"

If I slightly vary things and create one cherry-pick from the main GitLab
repository's master and the other cherry-pick from my local fork of master,
then I do get two branches, one named 'cherry-pick-{hash}' and the other
named 'cherry-pick-{hash}-2'. I'm not sure where I'd turn to get a
cherry-pick into the target master-3.0. Perhaps cherry-picking a
cherry-picked commit.

Has anyone else run into this, and do you have a workaround? Our existing
workflow has been built around cherry-picking, and this makes it harder.

John Thacker

[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/32348
[2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/merge_requests/13475/diffs
- The code has been moved around this since this merge, but it's the same
behavior
[3] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/18825
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/17462

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