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

Resolving merge conflicts


Merging in Git is typically fairly easy. Since Git stores and has access to the full graph of revisions, it can automatically find where the branches diverged, and merge only those divergent parts. This works even in the case of repeated merges, so you can keep a very long-lived branch up to date by repeatedly merging into it or by rebasing it on top of new changes.

However, it is not always possible to automatically combine changes. There are problems that Git cannot solve, for example because there were different changes to the same area of a file on different branches: these problems are called merge conflicts. Similarly, there can be problems while reapplying changes, though you would still get merge conflicts in case of problems.

The three-way merge

Unlike some other version control systems, Git does not try to be overly clever about merge conflict resolutions, and does not try to solve them all automatically. Git's philosophy is to be smart about determining...