I have two branches that are very different from each other, however one branch contains some useful code that I would like to add to the other branch. The branches diverged so long ago that i cannot merge them as many of their features are different and a merge is not viable.
The useful code from the donor branch was added in consecutive commits and I have the hashes of the commits I want to cherry-pick. When I give the command git cherry-pick hash1 hash2, I am told nothing to commit, working tree clean. The previous cherry pick ous now empty, possibly due to conflict resolution.
Is there a way to run through all the cherry-picks allowing any commits that will produce no change to pass automatically? I would rather not sit here and have to manually continue through each empty cherry-pick.
That should mean, as detailed here, that all of the changes introduced by that commit have been introduced by some commit on your current branch.
First of all, double-check you have checked out first the destination branch, and you are not still on the source branch (the one with hash1 hash2)
Then, you can skip empty commits using git rev-list as in here:
git rev-list --reverse something-begin..something-end . | git cherry-pick --stdin