Problems with diff between branches on presence of cherry-pick when create pull request

[Maximiliano Arcia]

I had a problem when i compare branches on bitbucket.

The issue is: i have a branch called branch_A for example, and start another branch from branch_A  and called branch_B.

Start working on both branches and, one commit for example that originally pushed to branch branch_B, i cherry pick it to branch branch_A .

Then when i try to compare the branches (Creating a Pull Request (PR) between them), i notice that the changes that where made for the commit that was later cherry-picked to branch_A appears to NOT be done. But if i look to the source code, i see that in both branches the changes are already there. 

I wonder why is happens this? If i compare those branches (git diff branch_A  branch_B), is showing all as expected, i use also git diff branch_A branch_B | grep "particular change" and it shows no changes. 

The expected view on Bitbucket tool is that the change must not be shown, because changes are on both branches, yes is true that where pushed with different commit hash, but the lines of code are exactly the same.

Any thoughts?

Thanks and regards

[Jeff Thomas · Accepted solution]

This is working as designed. When creating a pull request, Bitbucket Server displays the diff to the common ancestor of the two branches selected. On the command line this looks like git diff -M -C target-branch...source-branch – path/to/file.txt. What this diff shows you is the accumulation of the changes in the source branch since it branched from the target branch.

When you actually create the pull request the diff displayed is the diff which would be applied to the target branch as a result of merging the source branch into it. Locally this would be what you would see if you checked out the target branch and performed git merge source-branch --no-commit.

Most of the time, this diff will be exactly the same, but in some circumstances the diffs can be slightly different. In this instance, since you cherry-picked a change from one branch to the other, the pull request create screen will show that there are changes in a file, even though, the files match on both branches.

The preview may be slightly off, but after creating the pull request we will show the correct result in the pull request diff.