Git Merge Specifics Commits

Question

Suppose I have several tasks and every one is developed in a branch. I have three branchs too: develop, qa, production. Usually I merge every ticket into develop when is ready.

How can I merge into qa and production only the tasks I need from the branch develop?

Example:

I have task1, task2, task3, I merge to develop the task1, then the task2, then the task3. I delete the 3 tasks branchs. Now I need to merge the commits of task1 into qa. How can I do that?

Answer 1

In the future, I would not delete the task branches if you wish to merge them into QA as well (though I would recommend a different workflow altogether, like Git flow). If you have indeed already deleted the task branches, you can restore them with the following: git branch task1 ABC^2, where ABC is the commit where you merged task1 into develop. Then simply merge task1 into QA.

Answer 2

If you only wish to merge the commits from a particular branch, merging them from that specific branch is the cleanest approach to do so. If you've deleted the branch from the remote (but not local), then restore the remote and merge (for records' sake). If you've deleted from both remote and local, then look through your terminal history to see if you still have the SHA, recreate the branch (through git checkout <SHA> && git checkout -b <branch_name>), and continue from there.

Otherwise, you're going to have to cherry-pick them across branches, and depending on if they were fast-forward commits or not, this would be a lot trickier.

The use of a development and qa branch is a bit dubious; I would presume that the testing would happen on either development or qa, but not both.

If the intention is to treat one of those branches as an integration branch (a point where all code for a release comes together), then use either development or qa alone.