alternative to rebasing pushed commits

Question

The GitHub documentation recommends against rebasing commits that have been pushed publicly.

We have two branches master and dev. I have made a change to master for a hotfix that I would like to take across to dev, dev itself is fairly far ahead of master.

In this case the hotfix is to 2 files and is only a 1 line change in each.

What is the easiest way to get this to the dev branch without confusing things terribly?

Answer 1

If the hotfix is the only thing in master that isn't in dev you could simply merge master into your dev branch.

Otherwise, you'd probably want to just cherry pick that hotfix commit into your dev branch. Assuming that the hotfix is the latest commit in master you could just do:

git checkout dev
git cherry-pick master