[Gnu-arch-users] merge trouble

[Robert Anderson]

I've always gone out of my way to keep my branches related in simple
ways so as to avoid merge troubles, but it looks like I've got things
in a bind this time.

I have two branches A and B.   B is a feature branch which is intended
to fully merge into A.  (The situation is actually much more complex
than this, but I HOPE this is enough to describe the problem.)

Three times in the history of these branches,  I have done single
patch one-off replay merges ("cherry picking") of a patch from B to A,
when I'd made small fixes in the course of work on B that were needed
right away in A (I know, there's a better way, but that's what I did.)

Now I would like to merge to get B fully up to date with A, in
preparation for the final merge of everything on B into A.

But "star-merge A" in B's tree doesn't do at all what I want.  It ends
up deleting most of my changes on branch B.  This is of course not
what I want, and I admit to not fully understanding why this happens.

So my question is:  what's the best way to proceed now?  Is there a
way to effectively "back out" my cherry picking so that I can star
merge the whole thing smoothly?  Or is there a better way?

Bob