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

Single revision selection


During development, many times you want to select a single revision in the history of a project, to examine it, or to compare with the current version. The ability to a select revision is also the basis for selecting a revision range, for example a subsection of history to examine.

Many Git commands take revision parameters as arguments, which is typically denoted by <rev> in Git reference documentation. Git allows you to specify specific commits or a range of commits in several ways.

HEAD – the implicit revision

Most, but not all, Git commands that require the revision parameter, default to using HEAD. For example, git log and git log HEAD will show the same information.

The HEAD denotes the current branch, or in other words the commit that was checked out into the working directory, and forms a base of a current work.

There are a few other references which are similar to HEAD:

  • FETCH_HEAD: This records the information about the remote branches that were fetched...