Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By : Ferdinando Santacroce
Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By: Ferdinando Santacroce

Overview of this book

Since its inception, Git has attracted skilled developers due to its robust, powerful, and reliable features. Its incredibly fast branching ability transformed a piece of code from a niche tool for Linux Kernel developers into a mainstream distributed versioning system. Like most powerful tools, Git can be hard to approach since it has a lot of commands, subcommands, and options that easily confuse newcomers. The 2nd edition of this very successful book will help you overcome this fear and become adept in all the basic tasks in Git. Building upon the success of the first book, we start with a brief step-by-step installation guide; after this, you'll delve into the essentials of Git. For those of you who have bought the first edition, this time we go into internals in far greater depth, talking less about theory and using much more practical examples. The book serves as a primer for topics to follow, such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You’ll then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only the commits you want, followed by Git blame. Finally, we'll see how to interoperate with a Subversion server, covering the concepts and commands needed to convert an SVN repository into a Git repository. To conclude, this is a collection of resources, links, and appendices to satisfy even the most curious.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Using Git with a Subversion repository

Using Git as a client of Subversion can raise some confusions, due to the flexibility of Git as compared to the more rigid way Subversion organizes files.
To be sure to maintain a Subversion-friendly way of work, I recommend you follow some simple rules.

First of all, ensure that your Git master branch is related to the trunk one in Subversion; as we already said, Subversion users usually organize a repository in this way:

  • A /trunk folder, the main one
  • A /branches root folder, where you put all the branches, each one located in a separated subfolder (for example, /branches/feat-branch)
  • A /tags root folder, where you collect all the tags you made (for example, /tags/v1.0.0)

To adhere to this layout, you can use the --stdlayout option when cloning a Subversion repository:

$ git svn clone <url> --stdlayout 

In this manner, Git will hook...