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

Types and purposes of branches


A branch in a version control system is a active parallel line of development. They are useful, as we will see, to isolate and separate different types of work. For example, branches can be used to prevent your current work on a feature in progress from interfering with the management of bug fixes.

A single Git repository can have an arbitrary number of branches. Moreover, with a distributed version control system, such as Git, there could be many repositories (forks) for a single project, some public and some private; each repository will have its own local branches.

Before examining how the collaboration between repositories looks like at the branch level, we need to know what types of branches we would encounter in local and remote repositories. Let's now talk about how these branches are used and examine why people would want to use multiple branches in a single repository.

Note

A bit of history: a note on the evolution of branch management

Early distributed...