The DAG is labelled. Most labels are boringly "parent: commithash". In the raw plumbing you can build other labels, a "cherry-picks: commithash" or a "replaces: commithash" or all sorts of things. git log won't follow such edges today, but it doesn't need to, and a lot of the folks that don't like the DAG aesthetically might prefer that anyway, but the assumptions that "parent: commithash" are the "only" edges in the DAG aren't baked in as much as people assume. For instance, think about git notes, they can have some pretty exotic edges. Again, not many people use that power today and most of the git "porcelain" has no idea what to do with it, but the DAG as a raw data-structure absolutely supports it.
Very interesting. Thank you so much for teaching me. I guess it would be possible to create a git plugin that tracks such picked cherries and that provides changed merge and rebase commands. (The plugin would use the existing plumbing to provide new porcelain.)
My current team relies on manual tracking: if there is a bug that needs to be fixed on a release branch and on the main branch, then the developer is responsible for adding commits to both branches. (Whether that is by making the commit on one branch and cherry-picking it to another, or by just making the change twice, is up to each developer.). I'm glad that everyone is so detail-oriented; normally we don't forget. But better support for cherry-picking would be quite useful imho.
