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 8. Keeping History Clean

The previous chapter, Merging Changes Together, described how to join changes developed by different people (as described in Chapter 5, Collaborative Development with Git), or just developed in a separate feature branch (as shown in Chapter 6, Advanced Branching Techniques). One of the techniques was rebase, which can help bring a branch to be merged to a better state. But if we are rewriting history, perhaps it would be possible to also modify the commits being rebased to be easier for review, making the development steps of a feature clearer? If rewriting is forbidden, can one make history cleaner without it? How do we fix mistakes if we cannot rewrite history?

This chapter will answer all those questions. It will explain why one might want to keep clean history, when it can and should be done, and how it can be done. Here you will find step-by-step instructions on how to reorder, squash, and split commits. This chapter will also describe how to do large...