Introduce CHERRY_PICK_HEAD

When a cherry-pick conflicts git advises:

 $ git commit -c <original commit id>

to preserve the original commit message and authorship. Instead, let's
record the original commit id in CHERRY_PICK_HEAD and advise:

  $ git commit -c CHERRY_PICK_HEAD

A later patch teaches git to handle the '-c CHERRY_PICK_HEAD' part.
Note that we record CHERRY_PICK_HEAD even in the case where there
are no conflicts so that we may use it to communicate authorship to
commit; this will then allow us to remove set_author_ident_env from
revert.c. However, we do not record CHERRY_PICK_HEAD when --no-commit
is used, as presumably the user intends to further edit the commit
and possibly even cherry-pick additional commits on top.

Tests and documentation contributed by Jonathan Nieder.

Reviewed-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

2 files changed, 23 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt
index 73008705eb..cd848664ce 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-cherry-pick.txt
@@ -16,6 +16,25 @@ Given one or more existing commits, apply the change each one
 introduces, recording a new commit for each.  This requires your
 working tree to be clean (no modifications from the HEAD commit).
 
+When it is not obvious how to apply a change, the following
+happens:
+
+1. The current branch and `HEAD` pointer stay at the last commit
+   successfully made.
+2. The `CHERRY_PICK_HEAD` ref is set to point at the commit that
+   introduced the change that is difficult to apply.
+3. Paths in which the change applied cleanly are updated both
+   in the index file and in your working tree.
+4. For conflicting paths, the index file records up to three
+   versions, as described in the "TRUE MERGE" section of
+   linkgit:git-merge[1].  The working tree files will include
+   a description of the conflict bracketed by the usual
+   conflict markers `<<<<<<<` and `>>>>>>>`.
+5. No other modifications are made.
+
+See linkgit:git-merge[1] for some hints on resolving such
+conflicts.
+
 OPTIONS
 -------
 <commit>...::
diff --git a/Documentation/revisions.txt b/Documentation/revisions.txt
index 9e92734bc1..04fceee253 100644
--- a/Documentation/revisions.txt
+++ b/Documentation/revisions.txt
@@ -25,7 +25,8 @@ blobs contained in a commit.
   first match in the following rules:
 
   . if `$GIT_DIR/<name>` exists, that is what you mean (this is usually
-    useful only for `HEAD`, `FETCH_HEAD`, `ORIG_HEAD` and `MERGE_HEAD`);
+    useful only for `HEAD`, `FETCH_HEAD`, `ORIG_HEAD`, `MERGE_HEAD`
+    and `CHERRY_PICK_HEAD`);
 
   . otherwise, `refs/<name>` if exists;
 
@@ -46,6 +47,8 @@ you can change the tip of the branch back to the state before you ran
 them easily.
 MERGE_HEAD records the commit(s) you are merging into your branch
 when you run 'git merge'.
+CHERRY_PICK_HEAD records the commit you are cherry-picking
+when you run 'git cherry-pick'.
 +
 Note that any of the `refs/*` cases above may come either from
 the `$GIT_DIR/refs` directory or from the `$GIT_DIR/packed-refs` file.