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

Directed Acyclic Graphs


What makes version control systems different from backup applications is, among others, the ability to represent more than linear history. This is necessary, both to support the simultaneous parallel development by different developers (each developer in his or her own clone of repository), and to allow independent parallel lines of development—branches. For example, one might want to keep the ongoing development and work on bug fixes for the stable version isolated; this is possible by using individual branches for the separate lines of development. Version control system (VCS) thus needs to be able to model such a (non-linear) way of development and to have some structure to represent multiple revisions.

Fig 1. A generic example of the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). The same graph is represented on both sides: in free-form on the left, left-to-right order on the right.

The structure that Git uses (on the abstract level) to represent the possible non-linear history...