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

Chapter 2. Exploring Project History

One of the most important parts of mastering a version control system is exploring project history, making use of the fact that with version control systems we have an archive of every version that has ever existed. Here, the reader will learn how to select, filter, and view the range of revisions; how to refer to the revisions (revision selection); and how to find revisions using different criteria.

This chapter will introduce the concept of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of revisions and explain how this concept relates to the ideas of branches, tags, and of the current branch in Git.

Here is the list of topics we will cover in this chapter:

  • Revision selection

  • Revision range selection, limiting history, history simplification

  • Searching history with "pickaxe" tool and diff search

  • Finding bugs with git bisect

  • Line-wise history of file contents with git blame, and rename detection

  • Selecting and formatting output (the pretty formats)

  • Summarizing contribution with...