[billybob]

If I understand you correctly, your problem would occur if, say, you were maintaining 1.0 and 2.0 branches of a product and needed to apply the same bugfix to both; you can't merge, so you cherry-pick.

Surely this is something that the Linux project runs into constantly? I wonder if they have a solution?

[Peaker]

In the case of two maintenance branches (1.0, 2.0) you're probably going to use only cherry-picks, and no merges, and just manually track what you've already cherry-picked.

In our case, we had the "bleeding edge" branch (master) and a maintenance branch. Fixes generally go into the maintenance branch and then are merged upwards. But we allowed "emergency patches" to be cherry-picked upwards (or downwards) too. The combination is the problem.

If we had stuck to just cherry-picks or just merges, we would not have this problem. But as I also explained, sticking to one of the approaches has severe drawbacks too.