Git Cherry Picking Across Forked Repos and Empty Commits

Recently I found myself in a situation where I wanted to bring in a specific upstream commit into a forked repository. Although these repos share a common history, the two repos had diverged enough that it wasn’t a straight-forward cherry-pick between branches. Instead, with clones of the two repositories I managed to cherry-pick as follows:

git --git-dir=..//.git format-patch -k -1 --stdout  | git am -3 -k

To complicate things further, a few days later, I found myself wanting to do the same thing, however, this time a submodule and another file had diverged enough that the patch no longer applied correctly. To get around this I had to:

git --git-dir=..//.git format-patch -k -1 --stdout  | patch -p1 --merge

Manually fix any of the still broken changes, then create a new commit with the changes.

These two stack overflow questions helped to work both of these issues out: and

Finally, I’ve also in recent months found myself wanting to create a completely empty commit to kick off a downstream build process… much like you may touch a file to change its timestamp. To do this you can simply run:

git commit --allow-empty -m "Redeploy"