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

Rewriting history


Many times, while working on a project, you may want to revise your commit history. One reason for this could be to make it easier to review before submitting changes upstream. Another reason would be to take reviewer comments into account in the next improved version of changes. Or perhaps you'd like to have a clear history while finding regressions using bisection, as described in Chapter 2, Exploring Project History.

One of the great things about Git is that it makes revising and rewriting history possible, while providing a wide set of tools to revise history and make it clean.

Note

There are two conflicting views among users of the version control system: one states that history is sacred and you should better show the true history of the development, warts and all, and another that states that you should clean up the new history for better readability before publishing it.

An important issue to note is that, even though we talk about rewriting history, objects in Git...