Introduction: Merging

In this chapter, you will learn about:

• git merge
• Merge conflicts and how to resolve them
• Merges and log histories

Remembering branches

You’ve already covered the basics of branching in the previous chapter. As you will recall, branching gives you the ability to work on parallel streams of development in the same codebase.

Merging vs. branching

In a sense, merging is the opposite of branching. When you merge, you take two separate points in your development tree and fuse them together.

It’s important to understand merging, as it’s a routine job of a repository maintainer to merge branches together.

It’s also really important to take this chapter slowly and make sure you understand every step. It’s quite painful to wrap your head around merging properly. But once you do, your Git skills will improve.