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

Branching workflows and release engineering


Now that we know what types of branches are there and what their purposes are, let's examine how branches are used. Note that different situations call for different use of branches. For example, smaller projects are better suited for simpler branching workflows, while larger projects might need more advanced ones.

We will now describe here how to use different standard workflows. Each workflow is distinguished by the various types of branches it uses (the types described earlier in this chapter). In addition to getting to know how the ongoing development looks like for a given workflow, we would also see what to do at the time of the new release (major and minor, where relevant). Among others, we will find out what happens then to branches used in the chosen workflow.

The release and trunk branches workflow

One of the simplest workflows is to use just a single integration branch. Such branches are sometimes called the trunk; in Git, it would usually...