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

Repository maintenance


Occasionally, you may need to do some clean up of a repository, usually to make it more compact. Such clean ups are a very important step after migrating a repository from another version control system.

Modern Git (or rather all but ancient Git) from time to time runs the git gc --auto command in each repository. This command checks whether there are too many loose objects (objects stored as separate files, one file per object, rather than stored together in a packfile; objects are almost always created as loose), and if these conditions are met, then it would launch the garbage collection operation. The garbage collection means to gather up all the loose objects and place them in packfiles, and to consolidate many small packfiles into one large packfile. Additionally, it packs references into the packed-refs file. Objects that are unreachable even via reflog, and are safely old, do not get picked in the repack. Git would then delete loose objects and packfiles that...