Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)

Overview of this book

Git is one of the most popular types of Source Code Management (SCM) and Distributed Version Control System (DVCS). Despite the powerful and versatile nature of the tool enveloping strong support for nonlinear development and the ability to handle large projects efficiently, it is a complex tool and often regarded as “user-unfriendly”. Getting to know the ideas and concepts behind the architecture of Git will help you make full use of its power and understand its behavior. Learning the best practices and recommended workflows should help you to avoid problems and ensure trouble-free development. The book scope is meticulously designed to help you gain deeper insights into Git's architecture, its underlying concepts, behavior, and best practices. Mastering Git starts with a quick implementation example of using Git for a collaborative development of a sample project to establish the foundation knowledge of Git operational tasks and concepts. Furthermore, as you progress through the book, the tutorials provide detailed descriptions of various areas of usage: from archaeology, through managing your own work, to working with other developers. This book also helps augment your understanding to examine and explore project history, create and manage your contributions, set up repositories and branches for collaboration in centralized and distributed version control, integrate work from other developers, customize and extend Git, and recover from repository errors. By exploring advanced Git practices, you will attain a deeper understanding of Git’s behavior, allowing you to customize and extend existing recipes and write your own.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Git
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working on a project


Here are some guidelines on how to create changes and develop new revisions. These guidelines can be used either for your own work on your own project, or to help contribute your code to the project maintained by somebody else.

Different projects can use different development workflows; therefore, some of the recommendations presented here might not make sense, depending on the workflow that is used for a given project.

Working on a topic branch

Branching in Git has two functions (Chapter 6, Advanced Branching Techniques): as a mediator for the code contributed by developers keeping to the specified level of code stability and maturity (long-running public branches), and as a sandbox for the development of a new idea (short-lived private branches).

The ability to sandbox changes is why it is considered a good practice to create a separate branch for each new task you work on. Such a branch is called a topic branch or a feature branch. Using separate branches makes it possible...