Re: Really beginner on Version Control

Hi!

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 4:42 PM, FernandoBasso
[off-list ref] wrote:

I am really a beginner in. Bear with me please.

Why do we merge, say a testing branch into the master branch ? What is the
use of it ?

Ususally, one develops a feature on a separate branch to avoid polluting
the "master" branch with non working or fragile commits and prevent other people
from working.

You always merge a branch into the branch you *are* in.
For instance:
# Switch to master branch.
$ git checkout master

# List the available branches.
$ git branch
* master
  my-new-feature

# Merge the topic branch into master.
$ git merge my-new-feature

Here what I call a topic branch is what you call a "testing" branch.

When there is a conflict when merging branches (merging the testing into the
current branch), should I edit the 'current' branch or the 'testing' branch
?

If there is a conflict, in theory it means that *both* sides have
change a same location
in a tracked file.
Usually, it means that you have to take *both* contents and depending
on the context
write manually the result.

For instance, one can fork master to create a topic branch, then
changes are made
in the topic branch and in master. When you merge back your topic
branch you want
to integrate your changes but also preserving the changes that have
been made to master
between the time the topic branch has been created and now.

Should both branches have exactly the same code so that they can be merged
without conflicts ?

In general, yes.
Please note that git can work around whitespace problems (whitespace
versus tab and \n versus \r\n).

You may also want to google "git workflow" to get a rough idea about
how to manage a project
with git and how to do more advanced stuff with topic branches.

I hope it helps,
-- 
Thomas Moulard