Why It Is Called Cherry-Pick

From a tree full of fruit, you pick only the ripe ones. That is where the name cherry-pick comes from. A branch holds commits of all shapes and sizes, and cherry-pick lets you select just the one you want and carry it over to another branch.

This is not a personal trick. The Linux kernel uses cherry-pick to backport security fixes from mainline into older stable versions that are still supported. Chromium carries fixes into older release branches the same way. It is the everyday machinery behind one idea: we cannot take every new change, but this one critical fix must reach the old version too.

Use merge for a whole branch, and cherry-pick for one specific commit. It is a single line of command, yet it is a genuine standard technique that keeps large-scale release operations running across the world. Whenever you think "just that fix, right here, right now," this is the tool you reach for first.