Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By : Ferdinando Santacroce
Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By: Ferdinando Santacroce

Overview of this book

Since its inception, Git has attracted skilled developers due to its robust, powerful, and reliable features. Its incredibly fast branching ability transformed a piece of code from a niche tool for Linux Kernel developers into a mainstream distributed versioning system. Like most powerful tools, Git can be hard to approach since it has a lot of commands, subcommands, and options that easily confuse newcomers. The 2nd edition of this very successful book will help you overcome this fear and become adept in all the basic tasks in Git. Building upon the success of the first book, we start with a brief step-by-step installation guide; after this, you'll delve into the essentials of Git. For those of you who have bought the first edition, this time we go into internals in far greater depth, talking less about theory and using much more practical examples. The book serves as a primer for topics to follow, such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You’ll then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only the commits you want, followed by Git blame. Finally, we'll see how to interoperate with a Subversion server, covering the concepts and commands needed to convert an SVN repository into a Git repository. To conclude, this is a collection of resources, links, and appendices to satisfy even the most curious.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Cherry picking

Sometimes you don't want to merge two branches, but simply your desire is to apply the same changes in a commit on top to another branch. This situation is very common when working on bugs: you fix a bug in a branch, and then you want to apply the same fix on top of another branch.

Git has a convenient way to do it; this is the git cherry-pick command.

Let's play with it a little bit.

Assume you want to pick the blackberry from the berries branch, and then apply it into the master branch; this is the way:

[1] ~/grocery (master)
$ git cherry-pick ef6c382
error: could not apply ef6c382... Add a blackberry
hint: after resolving the conflicts, mark the corrected paths
hint: with 'git add <paths>' or 'git rm <paths>'
hint: and commit the result with 'git commit'

For the argument, you usually specify the hash of the...