git-cherry-pick.txt: clarify the use of revision range notation

When given a set of commits, cherry-pick will apply the changes for
all of them. Specifying a simple range will also work as expected.

This can lead the user to think that

    git cherry-pick A B..C

may apply A and then B..C, but that is not what happens.

Instead the revs are given to a single invocation of rev-list, which
will consider A and C as positive revs and B as a negative one.  The
commit A will not be used if it is an ancestor of B.

Add a note about this and add an example with this particular
syntax, which has shown up on the list a few times.

Signed-off-by: Carlos Martín Nieto <cmn@elego.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

diff --git a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt
index fed5097e00b4a031c2992ac3d421f6df975e6152..49ac61c3d02c2a1dd5111550f70f87cbd311c8f8 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt
@@ -47,7 +47,9 @@ OPTIONS
        linkgit:gitrevisions[7].
        Sets of commits can be passed but no traversal is done by
        default, as if the '--no-walk' option was specified, see
-       linkgit:git-rev-list[1].
+       linkgit:git-rev-list[1]. Note that specifying a range will
+       feed all <commit>... arguments to a single revision walk
+       (see a later example that uses 'maint master..next').
 
 -e::
 --edit::
@@ -130,6 +132,15 @@ EXAMPLES
        Apply the changes introduced by all commits that are ancestors
        of master but not of HEAD to produce new commits.
 
+`git cherry-pick maint next ^master`::
+`git cherry-pick maint master..next`::
+
+       Apply the changes introduced by all commits that are
+       ancestors of maint or next, but not master or any of its
+       ancestors.  Note that the latter does not mean `maint` and
+       everything between `master` and `next`; specifically,
+       `maint` will not be used if it is included in `master`.
+
 `git cherry-pick master{tilde}4 master{tilde}2`::
 
        Apply the changes introduced by the fifth and third last