git cherry-pick a commit, the commit updated later, how to get latest

Question

I cherry-pick a commit from another person's branch. Later the user updated his commit(maybe by squash), so the commit SHA changed. How do I cherry-pick to get latest commit?

Answer 1

Like most things in Git, there are many different ways to accomplish this. Yet there are multiple factors that could change the answer, including the current state of your branch, what you wish your branch to look like afterwards.

Based on larsks' suggestion:

You could git reset your repository to before you cherry-picked the earlier version of the commit, then just cherry-pick the new version.

And your response:

yeah that's a workaround. I'm wondering if there is way that doesn't require rebase, drop commit.

I'm going to assume you have more commits after the commit you already cherry-picked, otherwise you would simply do larsks' suggestion as written. In this case perhaps the simplest solution is to revert the original and repick the new one:

git revert <commit-id-on-your-branch-of-original-cherry-picked-commit>
git cherry-pick <new-id-of-commit-on-other-branch>

Now you might be done, or if you're willing to rewrite your branch you could interactive rebase and squash those 2 new commits up into the previous cherry-picked commit. This would preserve your original order.

Along the same lines, but without requiring an interactive rebase, you could also do:

# Assumptions:
#   Your current branch: "my-branch"
#   Original cherry-picked commit on your branch: <picked-commit-id>
#   New commit to cherry-pick from other branch <new-commit-id-to-pick>

# setup
git switch my-branch # checkout your branch
git branch my-branch-copy # make a temporary copy of your branch

# rebuild your branch
git reset --hard <picked-commit-id>~1 # reset to commit before the picked commit
git cherry-pick <new-commit-id-to-pick>
git cherry-pick <picked-commit-id>..my-branch-copy # rewrite your branch