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Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>Git User's Manual</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="docbook-xsl.css" type="text/css"><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.69.1"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div class="book" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h1 class="title"><a name="id232635"></a>Git User's Manual</h1></div></div><hr></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="preface"><a href="#id264704">Preface</a></span></dt><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id233155">1. Git Quick Start</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233166">Creating a new repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233198">Managing branches</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232445">Exploring history</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232489">Making changes</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233361">Merging</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233378">Sharing your changes</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233463">Repository maintenance</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id232662">2. Repositories and Branches</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232667">How to get a git repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232724">How to check out a different version of a project</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273520">Understanding History: Commits</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273583">Understanding history: commits, parents, and reachability</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273622">Understanding history: History diagrams</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273650">Understanding history: What is a branch?</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273673">Manipulating branches</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273806">Examining branches from a remote repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#how-git-stores-references">Naming branches, tags, and other references</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#Updating-a-repository-with-git-fetch">Updating a repository with git fetch</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274051">Fetching branches from other repositories</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id274126">3. Exploring git history</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274148">How to use bisect to find a regression</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274267">Naming commits</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274415">Creating tags</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274450">Browsing revisions</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274524">Generating diffs</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274567">Viewing old file versions</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274593">Examples</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274599">Check whether two branches point at the same history</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274652">Find first tagged version including a given fix</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id274815">4. Developing with git</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274821">Telling git your name</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274853">Creating a new repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#how-to-make-a-commit">how to make a commit</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275080">creating good commit messages</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275096">how to merge</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#resolving-a-merge">Resolving a merge</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275233">Getting conflict-resolution help during a merge</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#undoing-a-merge">undoing a merge</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275442">Fast-forward merges</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275470">Fixing mistakes</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275523">Fixing a mistake with a new commit</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#fixing-a-mistake-by-editing-history">Fixing a mistake by editing history</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275656">Checking out an old version of a file</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275714">Ensuring good performance</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275752">Ensuring reliability</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275757">Checking the repository for corruption</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275832">Recovering lost changes</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id275982">5. Sharing development with others</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#getting-updates-with-git-pull">Getting updates with git pull</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276114">Submitting patches to a project</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276163">Importing patches to a project</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#setting-up-a-public-repository">Setting up a public repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#exporting-via-http">Exporting a git repository via http</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#exporting-via-git">Exporting a git repository via the git protocol</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#pushing-changes-to-a-public-repository">Pushing changes to a public repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276576">Setting up a shared repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276595">Allow web browsing of a repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276608">Examples</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#cleaning-up-history">6. Rewriting history and maintaining patch series</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276640">Creating the perfect patch series</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276714">Keeping a patch series up to date using git-rebase</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276845">Modifying a single commit</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276935">Reordering or selecting from a patch series</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276995">Other tools</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277008">Problems with rewriting history</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id277079">7. Advanced branch management</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277085">Fetching individual branches</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#fast-forwards">Understanding git history: fast-forwards</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277205">Forcing git fetch to do non-fast-forward updates</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277232">Configuring remote branches</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#git-internals">8. Git internals</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277370">The Object Database</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277486">Blob Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277529">Tree Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232240">Commit Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277722">Trust</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277772">Tag Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277818">The "index" aka "Current Directory Cache"</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277894">The Workflow</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277912">working directory -&gt; index</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278002">index -&gt; object database</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278030">object database -&gt; index</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278061">index -&gt; working directory</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278125">Tying it all together</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278219">Examining the data</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278297">Merging multiple trees</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278385">Merging multiple trees, continued</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278645">How git stores objects efficiently: pack files</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#dangling-objects">Dangling objects</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id278905">9. GIT Glossary</a></span></dt><dt><span class="chapter"><a href="#id282187">10. Notes and todo list for this manual</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="preface" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id264704"></a>Preface</h2></div></div></div><p>This manual is designed to be readable by someone with basic unix
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:522command-line skills, but no previous knowledge of git.</p><p>Chapter 1 gives a brief overview of git commands, without any
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:223explanation; you may prefer to skip to chapter 2 on a first reading.</p><p>Chapters 2 and 3 explain how to fetch and study a project using
4git&#8212;the tools you'd need to build and test a particular version of a
5software project, to search for regressions, and so on.</p><p>Chapter 4 explains how to do development with git, and chapter 5 how
6to share that development with others.</p><p>Further chapters cover more specialized topics.</p><p>Comprehensive reference documentation is available through the man
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:297pages. For a command such as "git clone", just use</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ man git-clone</p></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id233155"></a>Chapter 1. Git Quick Start</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233166">Creating a new repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233198">Managing branches</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232445">Exploring history</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232489">Making changes</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233361">Merging</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233378">Sharing your changes</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id233463">Repository maintenance</a></span></dt></dl></div><p>This is a quick summary of the major commands; the following chapters
8will explain how these work in more detail.</p><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id233166"></a>Creating a new repository</h2></div></div></div><p>From a tarball:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ tar xzf project.tar.gz<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:229$ cd project<br>
10$ git init<br>
11Initialized empty Git repository in .git/<br>
12$ git add .<br>
13$ git commit</p></div><p>From a remote repository:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git clone git://example.com/pub/project.git<br>
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:2914$ cd project</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id233198"></a>Managing branches</h2></div></div></div><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch         # list all branches in this repo<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2215$ git checkout test  # switch working directory to branch "test"<br>
16$ git branch new     # create branch "new" starting at current HEAD<br>
17$ git branch -d new  # delete branch "new"</p></div><p>Instead of basing new branch on current HEAD (the default), use:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch new test    # branch named "test"<br>
18$ git branch new v2.6.15 # tag named v2.6.15<br>
19$ git branch new HEAD^   # commit before the most recent<br>
20$ git branch new HEAD^^  # commit before that<br>
21$ git branch new test~10 # ten commits before tip of branch "test"</p></div><p>Create and switch to a new branch at the same time:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout -b new v2.6.15</p></div><p>Update and examine branches from the repository you cloned from:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch             # update<br>
22$ git branch -r         # list<br>
23  origin/master<br>
24  origin/next<br>
25  ...<br>
26$ git branch checkout -b masterwork origin/master</p></div><p>Fetch a branch from a different repository, and give it a new
27name in your repository:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch git://example.com/project.git theirbranch:mybranch<br>
28$ git fetch git://example.com/project.git v2.6.15:mybranch</p></div><p>Keep a list of repositories you work with regularly:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git remote add example git://example.com/project.git<br>
29$ git remote                    # list remote repositories<br>
30example<br>
31origin<br>
32$ git remote show example       # get details<br>
33* remote example<br>
34  URL: git://example.com/project.git<br>
35  Tracked remote branches<br>
36    master next ...<br>
37$ git fetch example             # update branches from example<br>
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:2938$ git branch -r                 # list all remote branches</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id232445"></a>Exploring history</h2></div></div></div><div class="literallayout"><p>$ gitk                      # visualize and browse history<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2239$ git log                   # list all commits<br>
40$ git log src/              # ...modifying src/<br>
41$ git log v2.6.15..v2.6.16  # ...in v2.6.16, not in v2.6.15<br>
42$ git log master..test      # ...in branch test, not in branch master<br>
43$ git log test..master      # ...in branch master, but not in test<br>
44$ git log test...master     # ...in one branch, not in both<br>
45$ git log -S'foo()'         # ...where difference contain "foo()"<br>
46$ git log --since="2 weeks ago"<br>
47$ git log -p                # show patches as well<br>
48$ git show                  # most recent commit<br>
49$ git diff v2.6.15..v2.6.16 # diff between two tagged versions<br>
50$ git diff v2.6.15..HEAD    # diff with current head<br>
51$ git grep "foo()"          # search working directory for "foo()"<br>
52$ git grep v2.6.15 "foo()"  # search old tree for "foo()"<br>
53$ git show v2.6.15:a.txt    # look at old version of a.txt</p></div><p>Search for regressions:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git bisect start<br>
54$ git bisect bad                # current version is bad<br>
55$ git bisect good v2.6.13-rc2   # last known good revision<br>
56Bisecting: 675 revisions left to test after this<br>
57                                # test here, then:<br>
58$ git bisect good               # if this revision is good, or<br>
59$ git bisect bad                # if this revision is bad.<br>
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:2960                                # repeat until done.</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id232489"></a>Making changes</h2></div></div></div><p>Make sure git knows who to blame:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ cat &gt;~/.gitconfig &lt;&lt;\EOF<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2261[user]<br>
62name = Your Name Comes Here<br>
63email = you@yourdomain.example.com<br>
64EOF</p></div><p>Select file contents to include in the next commit, then make the
65commit:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git add a.txt    # updated file<br>
66$ git add b.txt    # new file<br>
67$ git rm c.txt     # old file<br>
68$ git commit</p></div><p>Or, prepare and create the commit in one step:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git commit d.txt # use latest content only of d.txt<br>
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:2969$ git commit -a    # use latest content of all tracked files</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id233361"></a>Merging</h2></div></div></div><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git merge test   # merge branch "test" into the current branch<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2270$ git pull git://example.com/project.git master<br>
71                   # fetch and merge in remote branch<br>
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:2972$ git pull . test  # equivalent to git merge test</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id233378"></a>Sharing your changes</h2></div></div></div><p>Importing or exporting patches:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git format-patch origin..HEAD # format a patch for each commit<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2273                                # in HEAD but not in origin<br>
74$ git-am mbox # import patches from the mailbox "mbox"</p></div><p>Fetch a branch in a different git repository, then merge into the
75current branch:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git pull git://example.com/project.git theirbranch</p></div><p>Store the fetched branch into a local branch before merging into the
76current branch:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git pull git://example.com/project.git theirbranch:mybranch</p></div><p>After creating commits on a local branch, update the remote
77branch with your commits:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git push ssh://example.com/project.git mybranch:theirbranch</p></div><p>When remote and local branch are both named "test":</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git push ssh://example.com/project.git test</p></div><p>Shortcut version for a frequently used remote repository:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git remote add example ssh://example.com/project.git<br>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:4178$ git push example test</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id233463"></a>Repository maintenance</h2></div></div></div><p>Check for corruption:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fsck</p></div><p>Recompress, remove unused cruft:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git gc</p></div></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id232662"></a>Chapter 2. Repositories and Branches</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232667">How to get a git repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232724">How to check out a different version of a project</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273520">Understanding History: Commits</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273583">Understanding history: commits, parents, and reachability</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273622">Understanding history: History diagrams</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273650">Understanding history: What is a branch?</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273673">Manipulating branches</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id273806">Examining branches from a remote repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#how-git-stores-references">Naming branches, tags, and other references</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#Updating-a-repository-with-git-fetch">Updating a repository with git fetch</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274051">Fetching branches from other repositories</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id232667"></a>How to get a git repository</h2></div></div></div><p>It will be useful to have a git repository to experiment with as you
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2279read this manual.</p><p>The best way to get one is by using the <a href="git-clone.html" target="_top">git-clone(1)</a> command
80to download a copy of an existing repository for a project that you
81are interested in. If you don't already have a project in mind, here
82are some interesting examples:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>        # git itself (approx. 10MB download):<br>
83$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git<br>
84        # the linux kernel (approx. 150MB download):<br>
85$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git</p></div><p>The initial clone may be time-consuming for a large project, but you
86will only need to clone once.</p><p>The clone command creates a new directory named after the project
87("git" or "linux-2.6" in the examples above). After you cd into this
88directory, you will see that it contains a copy of the project files,
89together with a special top-level directory named ".git", which
90contains all the information about the history of the project.</p><p>In most of the following, examples will be taken from one of the two
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:2991repositories above.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id232724"></a>How to check out a different version of a project</h2></div></div></div><p>Git is best thought of as a tool for storing the history of a
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2292collection of files. It stores the history as a compressed
93collection of interrelated snapshots (versions) of the project's
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:4194contents.</p><p>A single git repository may contain multiple branches. It keeps track
95of them by keeping a list of <a href="#def_head">heads</a> which reference the
96latest version on each branch; the <a href="git-branch.html" target="_top">git-branch(1)</a> command shows
97you the list of branch heads:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch<br>
98* master</p></div><p>A freshly cloned repository contains a single branch head, named
99"master", and working directory is initialized to the state of
100the project referred to by "master".</p><p>Most projects also use <a href="#def_tag">tags</a>. Tags, like heads, are
101references into the project's history, and can be listed using the
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22102<a href="git-tag.html" target="_top">git-tag(1)</a> command:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git tag -l<br>
103v2.6.11<br>
104v2.6.11-tree<br>
105v2.6.12<br>
106v2.6.12-rc2<br>
107v2.6.12-rc3<br>
108v2.6.12-rc4<br>
109v2.6.12-rc5<br>
110v2.6.12-rc6<br>
111v2.6.13<br>
112...</p></div><p>Tags are expected to always point at the same version of a project,
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41113while heads are expected to advance as development progresses.</p><p>Create a new branch head pointing to one of these versions and check it
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22114out using <a href="git-checkout.html" target="_top">git-checkout(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout -b new v2.6.13</p></div><p>The working directory then reflects the contents that the project had
115when it was tagged v2.6.13, and <a href="git-branch.html" target="_top">git-branch(1)</a> shows two
116branches, with an asterisk marking the currently checked-out branch:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch<br>
117  master<br>
118* new</p></div><p>If you decide that you'd rather see version 2.6.17, you can modify
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41119the current branch to point at v2.6.17 instead, with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git reset --hard v2.6.17</p></div><p>Note that if the current branch head was your only reference to a
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22120particular point in history, then resetting that branch may leave you
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41121with no way to find the history it used to point to; so use this command
122carefully.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id273520"></a>Understanding History: Commits</h2></div></div></div><p>Every change in the history of a project is represented by a commit.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22123The <a href="git-show.html" target="_top">git-show(1)</a> command shows the most recent commit on the
124current branch:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show<br>
125commit 2b5f6dcce5bf94b9b119e9ed8d537098ec61c3d2<br>
126Author: Jamal Hadi Salim &lt;hadi@cyberus.ca&gt;<br>
127Date:   Sat Dec 2 22:22:25 2006 -0800<br>
128<br>
129    [XFRM]: Fix aevent structuring to be more complete.<br>
130<br>
131    aevents can not uniquely identify an SA. We break the ABI with this<br>
132    patch, but consensus is that since it is not yet utilized by any<br>
133    (known) application then it is fine (better do it now than later).<br>
134<br>
135    Signed-off-by: Jamal Hadi Salim &lt;hadi@cyberus.ca&gt;<br>
136    Signed-off-by: David S. Miller &lt;davem@davemloft.net&gt;<br>
137<br>
138diff --git a/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt b/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt<br>
139index 8be626f..d7aac9d 100644<br>
140--- a/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt<br>
141+++ b/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt<br>
142@@ -47,10 +47,13 @@ aevent_id structure looks like:<br>
143<br>
144    struct xfrm_aevent_id {<br>
145              struct xfrm_usersa_id           sa_id;<br>
146+             xfrm_address_t                  saddr;<br>
147              __u32                           flags;<br>
148+             __u32                           reqid;<br>
149    };<br>
150...</p></div><p>As you can see, a commit shows who made the latest change, what they
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:29151did, and why.</p><p>Every commit has a 40-hexdigit id, sometimes called the "object name" or the
152"SHA1 id", shown on the first line of the "git show" output. You can usually
153refer to a commit by a shorter name, such as a tag or a branch name, but this
154longer name can also be useful. Most importantly, it is a globally unique
155name for this commit: so if you tell somebody else the object name (for
156example in email), then you are guaranteed that name will refer to the same
157commit in their repository that it does in yours (assuming their repository
158has that commit at all). Since the object name is computed as a hash over the
159contents of the commit, you are guaranteed that the commit can never change
160without its name also changing.</p><p>In fact, in <a href="#git-internals" title="Chapter 8. Git internals">Chapter 8, <i>Git internals</i></a> we shall see that everything stored in git
161history, including file data and directory contents, is stored in an object
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41162with a name that is a hash of its contents.</p><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id273583"></a>Understanding history: commits, parents, and reachability</h3></div></div></div><p>Every commit (except the very first commit in a project) also has a
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22163parent commit which shows what happened before this commit.
164Following the chain of parents will eventually take you back to the
165beginning of the project.</p><p>However, the commits do not form a simple list; git allows lines of
166development to diverge and then reconverge, and the point where two
167lines of development reconverge is called a "merge". The commit
168representing a merge can therefore have more than one parent, with
169each parent representing the most recent commit on one of the lines
170of development leading to that point.</p><p>The best way to see how this works is using the <a href="gitk.html" target="_top">gitk(1)</a>
171command; running gitk now on a git repository and looking for merge
172commits will help understand how the git organizes history.</p><p>In the following, we say that commit X is "reachable" from commit Y
173if commit X is an ancestor of commit Y. Equivalently, you could say
174that Y is a descendent of X, or that there is a chain of parents
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41175leading from commit Y to commit X.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id273622"></a>Understanding history: History diagrams</h3></div></div></div><p>We will sometimes represent git history using diagrams like the one
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22176below. Commits are shown as "o", and the links between them with
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20177lines drawn with - / and \. Time goes left to right:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--o &lt;-- Branch A
178 /
179 o--o--o &lt;-- master
180 \
181 o--o--o &lt;-- Branch B</pre><p>If we need to talk about a particular commit, the character "o" may
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41182be replaced with another letter or number.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id273650"></a>Understanding history: What is a branch?</h3></div></div></div><p>When we need to be precise, we will use the word "branch" to mean a line
183of development, and "branch head" (or just "head") to mean a reference
184to the most recent commit on a branch. In the example above, the branch
185head named "A" is a pointer to one particular commit, but we refer to
186the line of three commits leading up to that point as all being part of
187"branch A".</p><p>However, when no confusion will result, we often just use the term
188"branch" both for branches and for branch heads.</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id273673"></a>Manipulating branches</h2></div></div></div><p>Creating, deleting, and modifying branches is quick and easy; here's
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22189a summary of the commands:</p><div class="variablelist"><dl><dt><span class="term">
190git branch
191</span></dt><dd>
192 list all branches
193</dd><dt><span class="term">
194git branch &lt;branch&gt;
195</span></dt><dd>
196 create a new branch named &lt;branch&gt;, referencing the same
197 point in history as the current branch
198</dd><dt><span class="term">
199git branch &lt;branch&gt; &lt;start-point&gt;
200</span></dt><dd>
201 create a new branch named &lt;branch&gt;, referencing
202 &lt;start-point&gt;, which may be specified any way you like,
203 including using a branch name or a tag name
204</dd><dt><span class="term">
205git branch -d &lt;branch&gt;
206</span></dt><dd>
207 delete the branch &lt;branch&gt;; if the branch you are deleting
208 points to a commit which is not reachable from this branch,
209 this command will fail with a warning.
210</dd><dt><span class="term">
211git branch -D &lt;branch&gt;
212</span></dt><dd>
213 even if the branch points to a commit not reachable
214 from the current branch, you may know that that commit
215 is still reachable from some other branch or tag. In that
216 case it is safe to use this command to force git to delete
217 the branch.
218</dd><dt><span class="term">
219git checkout &lt;branch&gt;
220</span></dt><dd>
221 make the current branch &lt;branch&gt;, updating the working
222 directory to reflect the version referenced by &lt;branch&gt;
223</dd><dt><span class="term">
224git checkout -b &lt;new&gt; &lt;start-point&gt;
225</span></dt><dd>
226 create a new branch &lt;new&gt; referencing &lt;start-point&gt;, and
227 check it out.
228</dd></dl></div><p>It is also useful to know that the special symbol "HEAD" can always
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41229be used to refer to the current branch.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id273806"></a>Examining branches from a remote repository</h2></div></div></div><p>The "master" branch that was created at the time you cloned is a copy
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22230of the HEAD in the repository that you cloned from. That repository
231may also have had other branches, though, and your local repository
232keeps branches which track each of those remote branches, which you
233can view using the "-r" option to <a href="git-branch.html" target="_top">git-branch(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch -r<br>
234  origin/HEAD<br>
235  origin/html<br>
236  origin/maint<br>
237  origin/man<br>
238  origin/master<br>
239  origin/next<br>
240  origin/pu<br>
241  origin/todo</p></div><p>You cannot check out these remote-tracking branches, but you can
242examine them on a branch of your own, just as you would a tag:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout -b my-todo-copy origin/todo</p></div><p>Note that the name "origin" is just the name that git uses by default
243to refer to the repository that you cloned from.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="how-git-stores-references"></a>Naming branches, tags, and other references</h2></div></div></div><p>Branches, remote-tracking branches, and tags are all references to
244commits. All references are named with a slash-separated path name
245starting with "refs"; the names we've been using so far are actually
246shorthand:</p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul type="disc"><li>
247The branch "test" is short for "refs/heads/test".
248</li><li>
249The tag "v2.6.18" is short for "refs/tags/v2.6.18".
250</li><li>
251"origin/master" is short for "refs/remotes/origin/master".
252</li></ul></div><p>The full name is occasionally useful if, for example, there ever
253exists a tag and a branch with the same name.</p><p>As another useful shortcut, if the repository "origin" posesses only
254a single branch, you can refer to that branch as just "origin".</p><p>More generally, if you have defined a remote repository named
255"example", you can refer to the branch in that repository as
256"example". And for a repository with multiple branches, this will
257refer to the branch designated as the "HEAD" branch.</p><p>For the complete list of paths which git checks for references, and
258the order it uses to decide which to choose when there are multiple
259references with the same shorthand name, see the "SPECIFYING
260REVISIONS" section of <a href="git-rev-parse.html" target="_top">git-rev-parse(1)</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="Updating-a-repository-with-git-fetch"></a>Updating a repository with git fetch</h2></div></div></div><p>Eventually the developer cloned from will do additional work in her
261repository, creating new commits and advancing the branches to point
262at the new commits.</p><p>The command "git fetch", with no arguments, will update all of the
263remote-tracking branches to the latest version found in her
264repository. It will not touch any of your own branches&#8212;not even the
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41265"master" branch that was created for you on clone.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274051"></a>Fetching branches from other repositories</h2></div></div></div><p>You can also track branches from repositories other than the one you
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22266cloned from, using <a href="git-remote.html" target="_top">git-remote(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git remote add linux-nfs git://linux-nfs.org/pub/nfs-2.6.git<br>
267$ git fetch<br>
268* refs/remotes/linux-nfs/master: storing branch 'master' ...<br>
269  commit: bf81b46</p></div><p>New remote-tracking branches will be stored under the shorthand name
270that you gave "git remote add", in this case linux-nfs:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch -r<br>
271linux-nfs/master<br>
272origin/master</p></div><p>If you run "git fetch &lt;remote&gt;" later, the tracking branches for the
273named &lt;remote&gt; will be updated.</p><p>If you examine the file .git/config, you will see that git has added
274a new stanza:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ cat .git/config<br>
275...<br>
276[remote "linux-nfs"]<br>
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20277        url = git://linux-nfs.org/pub/nfs-2.6.git<br>
278        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/linux-nfs/*<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22279...</p></div><p>This is what causes git to track the remote's branches; you may modify
280or delete these configuration options by editing .git/config with a
281text editor. (See the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41282<a href="git-config.html" target="_top">git-config(1)</a> for details.)</p></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id274126"></a>Chapter 3. Exploring git history</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274148">How to use bisect to find a regression</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274267">Naming commits</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274415">Creating tags</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274450">Browsing revisions</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274524">Generating diffs</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274567">Viewing old file versions</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274593">Examples</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274599">Check whether two branches point at the same history</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274652">Find first tagged version including a given fix</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></div><p>Git is best thought of as a tool for storing the history of a
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22283collection of files. It does this by storing compressed snapshots of
284the contents of a file heirarchy, together with "commits" which show
285the relationships between these snapshots.</p><p>Git provides extremely flexible and fast tools for exploring the
Junio C Hamano39381a72007-02-02 07:35:15286history of a project.</p><p>We start with one specialized tool that is useful for finding the
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41287commit that introduced a bug into a project.</p><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274148"></a>How to use bisect to find a regression</h2></div></div></div><p>Suppose version 2.6.18 of your project worked, but the version at
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22288"master" crashes. Sometimes the best way to find the cause of such a
289regression is to perform a brute-force search through the project's
290history to find the particular commit that caused the problem. The
291<a href="git-bisect.html" target="_top">git-bisect(1)</a> command can help you do this:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git bisect start<br>
292$ git bisect good v2.6.18<br>
293$ git bisect bad master<br>
294Bisecting: 3537 revisions left to test after this<br>
295[65934a9a028b88e83e2b0f8b36618fe503349f8e] BLOCK: Make USB storage depend on SCSI rather than selecting it [try #6]</p></div><p>If you run "git branch" at this point, you'll see that git has
296temporarily moved you to a new branch named "bisect". This branch
297points to a commit (with commit id 65934&#8230;) that is reachable from
298v2.6.19 but not from v2.6.18. Compile and test it, and see whether
299it crashes. Assume it does crash. Then:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git bisect bad<br>
300Bisecting: 1769 revisions left to test after this<br>
301[7eff82c8b1511017ae605f0c99ac275a7e21b867] i2c-core: Drop useless bitmaskings</p></div><p>checks out an older version. Continue like this, telling git at each
302stage whether the version it gives you is good or bad, and notice
303that the number of revisions left to test is cut approximately in
304half each time.</p><p>After about 13 tests (in this case), it will output the commit id of
305the guilty commit. You can then examine the commit with
306<a href="git-show.html" target="_top">git-show(1)</a>, find out who wrote it, and mail them your bug
307report with the commit id. Finally, run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git bisect reset</p></div><p>to return you to the branch you were on before and delete the
308temporary "bisect" branch.</p><p>Note that the version which git-bisect checks out for you at each
309point is just a suggestion, and you're free to try a different
310version if you think it would be a good idea. For example,
311occasionally you may land on a commit that broke something unrelated;
312run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git bisect-visualize</p></div><p>which will run gitk and label the commit it chose with a marker that
313says "bisect". Chose a safe-looking commit nearby, note its commit
314id, and check it out with:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git reset --hard fb47ddb2db...</p></div><p>then test, run "bisect good" or "bisect bad" as appropriate, and
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41315continue.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274267"></a>Naming commits</h2></div></div></div><p>We have seen several ways of naming commits already:</p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul type="disc"><li>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:2231640-hexdigit object name
317</li><li>
318branch name: refers to the commit at the head of the given
319 branch
320</li><li>
321tag name: refers to the commit pointed to by the given tag
322 (we've seen branches and tags are special cases of
323 <a href="#how-git-stores-references" title="Naming branches, tags, and other references">references</a>).
324</li><li>
325HEAD: refers to the head of the current branch
326</li></ul></div><p>There are many more; see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section of the
327<a href="git-rev-parse.html" target="_top">git-rev-parse(1)</a> man page for the complete list of ways to
328name revisions. Some examples:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show fb47ddb2 # the first few characters of the object name<br>
329                    # are usually enough to specify it uniquely<br>
330$ git show HEAD^    # the parent of the HEAD commit<br>
331$ git show HEAD^^   # the grandparent<br>
332$ git show HEAD~4   # the great-great-grandparent</p></div><p>Recall that merge commits may have more than one parent; by default,
333^ and ~ follow the first parent listed in the commit, but you can
334also choose:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show HEAD^1   # show the first parent of HEAD<br>
335$ git show HEAD^2   # show the second parent of HEAD</p></div><p>In addition to HEAD, there are several other special names for
336commits:</p><p>Merges (to be discussed later), as well as operations such as
337git-reset, which change the currently checked-out commit, generally
338set ORIG_HEAD to the value HEAD had before the current operation.</p><p>The git-fetch operation always stores the head of the last fetched
339branch in FETCH_HEAD. For example, if you run git fetch without
340specifying a local branch as the target of the operation</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git theirbranch</p></div><p>the fetched commits will still be available from FETCH_HEAD.</p><p>When we discuss merges we'll also see the special name MERGE_HEAD,
341which refers to the other branch that we're merging in to the current
342branch.</p><p>The <a href="git-rev-parse.html" target="_top">git-rev-parse(1)</a> command is a low-level command that is
343occasionally useful for translating some name for a commit to the object
344name for that commit:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git rev-parse origin<br>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41345e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274415"></a>Creating tags</h2></div></div></div><p>We can also create a tag to refer to a particular commit; after
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22346running</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-tag stable-1 1b2e1d63ff</p></div><p>You can use stable-1 to refer to the commit 1b2e1d63ff.</p><p>This creates a "lightweight" tag. If the tag is a tag you wish to
347share with others, and possibly sign cryptographically, then you
348should create a tag object instead; see the <a href="git-tag.html" target="_top">git-tag(1)</a> man
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41349page for details.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274450"></a>Browsing revisions</h2></div></div></div><p>The <a href="git-log.html" target="_top">git-log(1)</a> command can show lists of commits. On its
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22350own, it shows all commits reachable from the parent commit; but you
351can also make more specific requests:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git log v2.5..        # commits since (not reachable from) v2.5<br>
352$ git log test..master  # commits reachable from master but not test<br>
353$ git log master..test  # ...reachable from test but not master<br>
354$ git log master...test # ...reachable from either test or master,<br>
355                        #    but not both<br>
356$ git log --since="2 weeks ago" # commits from the last 2 weeks<br>
357$ git log Makefile      # commits which modify Makefile<br>
358$ git log fs/           # ... which modify any file under fs/<br>
359$ git log -S'foo()'     # commits which add or remove any file data<br>
360                        # matching the string 'foo()'</p></div><p>And of course you can combine all of these; the following finds
361commits since v2.5 which touch the Makefile or any file under fs:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git log v2.5.. Makefile fs/</p></div><p>You can also ask git log to show patches:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git log -p</p></div><p>See the "&#8212;pretty" option in the <a href="git-log.html" target="_top">git-log(1)</a> man page for more
362display options.</p><p>Note that git log starts with the most recent commit and works
363backwards through the parents; however, since git history can contain
Junio C Hamanoee1e4282007-02-04 08:32:04364multiple independent lines of development, the particular order that
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41365commits are listed in may be somewhat arbitrary.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274524"></a>Generating diffs</h2></div></div></div><p>You can generate diffs between any two versions using
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22366<a href="git-diff.html" target="_top">git-diff(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff master..test</p></div><p>Sometimes what you want instead is a set of patches:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git format-patch master..test</p></div><p>will generate a file with a patch for each commit reachable from test
367but not from master. Note that if master also has commits which are
368not reachable from test, then the combined result of these patches
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41369will not be the same as the diff produced by the git-diff example.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274567"></a>Viewing old file versions</h2></div></div></div><p>You can always view an old version of a file by just checking out the
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22370correct revision first. But sometimes it is more convenient to be
371able to view an old version of a single file without checking
372anything out; this command does that:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show v2.5:fs/locks.c</p></div><p>Before the colon may be anything that names a commit, and after it
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41373may be any path to a file tracked by git.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274593"></a>Examples</h2></div></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id274599"></a>Check whether two branches point at the same history</h3></div></div></div><p>Suppose you want to check whether two branches point at the same point
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22374in history.</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff origin..master</p></div><p>will tell you whether the contents of the project are the same at the
375two branches; in theory, however, it's possible that the same project
376contents could have been arrived at by two different historical
377routes. You could compare the object names:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git rev-list origin<br>
378e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b<br>
379$ git rev-list master<br>
380e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b</p></div><p>Or you could recall that the &#8230; operator selects all commits
381contained reachable from either one reference or the other but not
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41382both: so</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git log origin...master</p></div><p>will return no commits when the two branches are equal.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id274652"></a>Find first tagged version including a given fix</h3></div></div></div><p>Suppose you know that the commit e05db0fd fixed a certain problem.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22383You'd like to find the earliest tagged release that contains that
384fix.</p><p>Of course, there may be more than one answer&#8212;if the history branched
385after commit e05db0fd, then there could be multiple "earliest" tagged
386releases.</p><p>You could just visually inspect the commits since e05db0fd:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ gitk e05db0fd..</p></div><p>Or you can use <a href="git-name-rev.html" target="_top">git-name-rev(1)</a>, which will give the commit a
387name based on any tag it finds pointing to one of the commit's
388descendants:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git name-rev e05db0fd<br>
389e05db0fd tags/v1.5.0-rc1^0~23</p></div><p>The <a href="git-describe.html" target="_top">git-describe(1)</a> command does the opposite, naming the
390revision using a tag on which the given commit is based:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git describe e05db0fd<br>
391v1.5.0-rc0-ge05db0f</p></div><p>but that may sometimes help you guess which tags might come after the
392given commit.</p><p>If you just want to verify whether a given tagged version contains a
393given commit, you could use <a href="git-merge-base.html" target="_top">git-merge-base(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git merge-base e05db0fd v1.5.0-rc1<br>
394e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b</p></div><p>The merge-base command finds a common ancestor of the given commits,
395and always returns one or the other in the case where one is a
396descendant of the other; so the above output shows that e05db0fd
397actually is an ancestor of v1.5.0-rc1.</p><p>Alternatively, note that</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git log v1.5.0-rc1..e05db0fd</p></div><p>will produce empty output if and only if v1.5.0-rc1 includes e05db0fd,
398because it outputs only commits that are not reachable from v1.5.0-rc1.</p><p>As yet another alternative, the <a href="git-show-branch.html" target="_top">git-show-branch(1)</a> command lists
399the commits reachable from its arguments with a display on the left-hand
400side that indicates which arguments that commit is reachable from. So,
401you can run something like</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show-branch e05db0fd v1.5.0-rc0 v1.5.0-rc1 v1.5.0-rc2<br>
402! [e05db0fd] Fix warnings in sha1_file.c - use C99 printf format if<br>
403available<br>
404 ! [v1.5.0-rc0] GIT v1.5.0 preview<br>
405  ! [v1.5.0-rc1] GIT v1.5.0-rc1<br>
406   ! [v1.5.0-rc2] GIT v1.5.0-rc2<br>
407...</p></div><p>then search for a line that looks like</p><div class="literallayout"><p>+ ++ [e05db0fd] Fix warnings in sha1_file.c - use C99 printf format if<br>
408available</p></div><p>Which shows that e05db0fd is reachable from itself, from v1.5.0-rc1, and
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41409from v1.5.0-rc2, but not from v1.5.0-rc0.</p></div></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id274815"></a>Chapter 4. Developing with git</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274821">Telling git your name</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id274853">Creating a new repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#how-to-make-a-commit">how to make a commit</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275080">creating good commit messages</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275096">how to merge</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#resolving-a-merge">Resolving a merge</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275233">Getting conflict-resolution help during a merge</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#undoing-a-merge">undoing a merge</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275442">Fast-forward merges</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275470">Fixing mistakes</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275523">Fixing a mistake with a new commit</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#fixing-a-mistake-by-editing-history">Fixing a mistake by editing history</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275656">Checking out an old version of a file</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275714">Ensuring good performance</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275752">Ensuring reliability</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275757">Checking the repository for corruption</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id275832">Recovering lost changes</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274821"></a>Telling git your name</h2></div></div></div><p>Before creating any commits, you should introduce yourself to git. The
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22410easiest way to do so is:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ cat &gt;~/.gitconfig &lt;&lt;\EOF<br>
411[user]<br>
412        name = Your Name Comes Here<br>
413        email = you@yourdomain.example.com<br>
414EOF</p></div><p>(See the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of <a href="git-config.html" target="_top">git-config(1)</a> for
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41415details on the configuration file.)</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id274853"></a>Creating a new repository</h2></div></div></div><p>Creating a new repository from scratch is very easy:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ mkdir project<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22416$ cd project<br>
417$ git init</p></div><p>If you have some initial content (say, a tarball):</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ tar -xzvf project.tar.gz<br>
418$ cd project<br>
419$ git init<br>
420$ git add . # include everything below ./ in the first commit:<br>
421$ git commit</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="how-to-make-a-commit"></a>how to make a commit</h2></div></div></div><p>Creating a new commit takes three steps:</p><div class="orderedlist"><ol type="1"><li>
422Making some changes to the working directory using your
423 favorite editor.
424</li><li>
425Telling git about your changes.
426</li><li>
427Creating the commit using the content you told git about
428 in step 2.
429</li></ol></div><p>In practice, you can interleave and repeat steps 1 and 2 as many
430times as you want: in order to keep track of what you want committed
431at step 3, git maintains a snapshot of the tree's contents in a
432special staging area called "the index."</p><p>At the beginning, the content of the index will be identical to
433that of the HEAD. The command "git diff &#8212;cached", which shows
434the difference between the HEAD and the index, should therefore
435produce no output at that point.</p><p>Modifying the index is easy:</p><p>To update the index with the new contents of a modified file, use</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git add path/to/file</p></div><p>To add the contents of a new file to the index, use</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git add path/to/file</p></div><p>To remove a file from the index and from the working tree,</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git rm path/to/file</p></div><p>After each step you can verify that</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff --cached</p></div><p>always shows the difference between the HEAD and the index file&#8212;this
436is what you'd commit if you created the commit now&#8212;and that</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff</p></div><p>shows the difference between the working tree and the index file.</p><p>Note that "git add" always adds just the current contents of a file
437to the index; further changes to the same file will be ignored unless
438you run git-add on the file again.</p><p>When you're ready, just run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git commit</p></div><p>and git will prompt you for a commit message and then create the new
Junio C Hamanoee1e4282007-02-04 08:32:04439commit. Check to make sure it looks like what you expected with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show</p></div><p>As a special shortcut,</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git commit -a</p></div><p>will update the index with any files that you've modified or removed
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22440and create a commit, all in one step.</p><p>A number of commands are useful for keeping track of what you're
441about to commit:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff --cached # difference between HEAD and the index; what<br>
442                    # would be commited if you ran "commit" now.<br>
443$ git diff          # difference between the index file and your<br>
444                    # working directory; changes that would not<br>
445                    # be included if you ran "commit" now.<br>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41446$ git status        # a brief per-file summary of the above.</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id275080"></a>creating good commit messages</h2></div></div></div><p>Though not required, it's a good idea to begin the commit message
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22447with a single short (less than 50 character) line summarizing the
448change, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough
449description. Tools that turn commits into email, for example, use
450the first line on the Subject line and the rest of the commit in the
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41451body.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id275096"></a>how to merge</h2></div></div></div><p>You can rejoin two diverging branches of development using
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22452<a href="git-merge.html" target="_top">git-merge(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git merge branchname</p></div><p>merges the development in the branch "branchname" into the current
453branch. If there are conflicts&#8212;for example, if the same file is
454modified in two different ways in the remote branch and the local
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20455branch&#8212;then you are warned; the output may look something like this:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git merge next<br>
456 100% (4/4) done<br>
457Auto-merged file.txt<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22458CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in file.txt<br>
459Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.</p></div><p>Conflict markers are left in the problematic files, and after
460you resolve the conflicts manually, you can update the index
461with the contents and run git commit, as you normally would when
462creating a new file.</p><p>If you examine the resulting commit using gitk, you will see that it
463has two parents, one pointing to the top of the current branch, and
464one to the top of the other branch.</p><p>In more detail:</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="resolving-a-merge"></a>Resolving a merge</h2></div></div></div><p>When a merge isn't resolved automatically, git leaves the index and
465the working tree in a special state that gives you all the
466information you need to help resolve the merge.</p><p>Files with conflicts are marked specially in the index, so until you
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:29467resolve the problem and update the index, <a href="git-commit.html" target="_top">git-commit(1)</a> will
468fail:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git commit<br>
469file.txt: needs merge</p></div><p>Also, <a href="git-status.html" target="_top">git-status(1)</a> will list those files as "unmerged", and the
470files with conflicts will have conflict markers added, like this:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt; HEAD:file.txt<br>
471Hello world<br>
472=======<br>
473Goodbye<br>
474&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt; 77976da35a11db4580b80ae27e8d65caf5208086:file.txt</p></div><p>All you need to do is edit the files to resolve the conflicts, and then</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git add file.txt<br>
475$ git commit</p></div><p>Note that the commit message will already be filled in for you with
476some information about the merge. Normally you can just use this
477default message unchanged, but you may add additional commentary of
478your own if desired.</p><p>The above is all you need to know to resolve a simple merge. But git
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41479also provides more information to help resolve conflicts:</p><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id275233"></a>Getting conflict-resolution help during a merge</h3></div></div></div><p>All of the changes that git was able to merge automatically are
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22480already added to the index file, so <a href="git-diff.html" target="_top">git-diff(1)</a> shows only
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:29481the conflicts. It uses an unusual syntax:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22482diff --cc file.txt<br>
483index 802992c,2b60207..0000000<br>
484--- a/file.txt<br>
485+++ b/file.txt<br>
486@@@ -1,1 -1,1 +1,5 @@@<br>
487++&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt; HEAD:file.txt<br>
488 +Hello world<br>
489++=======<br>
490+ Goodbye<br>
491++&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt; 77976da35a11db4580b80ae27e8d65caf5208086:file.txt</p></div><p>Recall that the commit which will be commited after we resolve this
492conflict will have two parents instead of the usual one: one parent
493will be HEAD, the tip of the current branch; the other will be the
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:29494tip of the other branch, which is stored temporarily in MERGE_HEAD.</p><p>During the merge, the index holds three versions of each file. Each of
495these three "file stages" represents a different version of the file:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show :1:file.txt  # the file in a common ancestor of both branches<br>
496$ git show :2:file.txt  # the version from HEAD, but including any<br>
497                        # nonconflicting changes from MERGE_HEAD<br>
498$ git show :3:file.txt  # the version from MERGE_HEAD, but including any<br>
499                        # nonconflicting changes from HEAD.</p></div><p>Since the stage 2 and stage 3 versions have already been updated with
500nonconflicting changes, the only remaining differences between them are
501the important ones; thus <a href="git-diff.html" target="_top">git-diff(1)</a> can use the information in
502the index to show only those conflicts.</p><p>The diff above shows the differences between the working-tree version of
503file.txt and the stage 2 and stage 3 versions. So instead of preceding
504each line by a single "+" or "-", it now uses two columns: the first
505column is used for differences between the first parent and the working
506directory copy, and the second for differences between the second parent
507and the working directory copy. (See the "COMBINED DIFF FORMAT" section
508of <a href="git-diff-files.html" target="_top">git-diff-files(1)</a> for a details of the format.)</p><p>After resolving the conflict in the obvious way (but before updating the
509index), the diff will look like:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22510diff --cc file.txt<br>
511index 802992c,2b60207..0000000<br>
512--- a/file.txt<br>
513+++ b/file.txt<br>
514@@@ -1,1 -1,1 +1,1 @@@<br>
515- Hello world<br>
516 -Goodbye<br>
517++Goodbye world</p></div><p>This shows that our resolved version deleted "Hello world" from the
518first parent, deleted "Goodbye" from the second parent, and added
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:29519"Goodbye world", which was previously absent from both.</p><p>Some special diff options allow diffing the working directory against
520any of these stages:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git diff -1 file.txt          # diff against stage 1<br>
521$ git diff --base file.txt      # same as the above<br>
522$ git diff -2 file.txt          # diff against stage 2<br>
523$ git diff --ours file.txt      # same as the above<br>
524$ git diff -3 file.txt          # diff against stage 3<br>
525$ git diff --theirs file.txt    # same as the above.</p></div><p>The <a href="git-log.html" target="_top">git-log(1)</a> and gitk[1] commands also provide special help
526for merges:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git log --merge<br>
527$ gitk --merge</p></div><p>These will display all commits which exist only on HEAD or on
528MERGE_HEAD, and which touch an unmerged file.</p><p>Each time you resolve the conflicts in a file and update the index:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git add file.txt</p></div><p>the different stages of that file will be "collapsed", after which
529git-diff will (by default) no longer show diffs for that file.</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="undoing-a-merge"></a>undoing a merge</h2></div></div></div><p>If you get stuck and decide to just give up and throw the whole mess
530away, you can always return to the pre-merge state with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git reset --hard HEAD</p></div><p>Or, if you've already commited the merge that you want to throw away,</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD</p></div><p>However, this last command can be dangerous in some cases&#8212;never
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22531throw away a commit you have already committed if that commit may
532itself have been merged into another branch, as doing so may confuse
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41533further merges.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id275442"></a>Fast-forward merges</h2></div></div></div><p>There is one special case not mentioned above, which is treated
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22534differently. Normally, a merge results in a merge commit, with two
535parents, one pointing at each of the two lines of development that
536were merged.</p><p>However, if one of the two lines of development is completely
537contained within the other&#8212;so every commit present in the one is
538already contained in the other&#8212;then git just performs a
539<a href="#fast-forwards" title="Understanding git history: fast-forwards">fast forward</a>; the head of the current branch is
540moved forward to point at the head of the merged-in branch, without
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41541any new commits being created.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id275470"></a>Fixing mistakes</h2></div></div></div><p>If you've messed up the working tree, but haven't yet committed your
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22542mistake, you can return the entire working tree to the last committed
543state with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git reset --hard HEAD</p></div><p>If you make a commit that you later wish you hadn't, there are two
544fundamentally different ways to fix the problem:</p><div class="orderedlist"><ol type="1"><li>
545You can create a new commit that undoes whatever was done
546 by the previous commit. This is the correct thing if your
547 mistake has already been made public.
548</li><li>
549You can go back and modify the old commit. You should
550 never do this if you have already made the history public;
551 git does not normally expect the "history" of a project to
552 change, and cannot correctly perform repeated merges from
553 a branch that has had its history changed.
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41554</li></ol></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id275523"></a>Fixing a mistake with a new commit</h3></div></div></div><p>Creating a new commit that reverts an earlier change is very easy;
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22555just pass the <a href="git-revert.html" target="_top">git-revert(1)</a> command a reference to the bad
556commit; for example, to revert the most recent commit:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git revert HEAD</p></div><p>This will create a new commit which undoes the change in HEAD. You
557will be given a chance to edit the commit message for the new commit.</p><p>You can also revert an earlier change, for example, the next-to-last:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git revert HEAD^</p></div><p>In this case git will attempt to undo the old change while leaving
558intact any changes made since then. If more recent changes overlap
559with the changes to be reverted, then you will be asked to fix
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:29560conflicts manually, just as in the case of <a href="#resolving-a-merge" title="Resolving a merge">resolving a merge</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="fixing-a-mistake-by-editing-history"></a>Fixing a mistake by editing history</h3></div></div></div><p>If the problematic commit is the most recent commit, and you have not
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22561yet made that commit public, then you may just
562<a href="#undoing-a-merge" title="undoing a merge">destroy it using git-reset</a>.</p><p>Alternatively, you
563can edit the working directory and update the index to fix your
564mistake, just as if you were going to <a href="#how-to-make-a-commit" title="how to make a commit">create a new commit</a>, then run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git commit --amend</p></div><p>which will replace the old commit by a new commit incorporating your
565changes, giving you a chance to edit the old commit message first.</p><p>Again, you should never do this to a commit that may already have
566been merged into another branch; use <a href="git-revert.html" target="_top">git-revert(1)</a> instead in
567that case.</p><p>It is also possible to edit commits further back in the history, but
568this is an advanced topic to be left for
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41569<a href="#cleaning-up-history" title="Chapter 6. Rewriting history and maintaining patch series">another chapter</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id275656"></a>Checking out an old version of a file</h3></div></div></div><p>In the process of undoing a previous bad change, you may find it
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22570useful to check out an older version of a particular file using
571<a href="git-checkout.html" target="_top">git-checkout(1)</a>. We've used git checkout before to switch
572branches, but it has quite different behavior if it is given a path
573name: the command</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout HEAD^ path/to/file</p></div><p>replaces path/to/file by the contents it had in the commit HEAD^, and
574also updates the index to match. It does not change branches.</p><p>If you just want to look at an old version of the file, without
575modifying the working directory, you can do that with
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41576<a href="git-show.html" target="_top">git-show(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show HEAD^:path/to/file</p></div><p>which will display the given version of the file.</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id275714"></a>Ensuring good performance</h2></div></div></div><p>On large repositories, git depends on compression to keep the history
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22577information from taking up to much space on disk or in memory.</p><p>This compression is not performed automatically. Therefore you
578should occasionally run <a href="git-gc.html" target="_top">git-gc(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git gc</p></div><p>to recompress the archive. This can be very time-consuming, so
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41579you may prefer to run git-gc when you are not doing other work.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id275752"></a>Ensuring reliability</h2></div></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id275757"></a>Checking the repository for corruption</h3></div></div></div><p>The <a href="git-fsck.html" target="_top">git-fsck(1)</a> command runs a number of self-consistency checks
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22580on the repository, and reports on any problems. This may take some
581time. The most common warning by far is about "dangling" objects:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fsck<br>
582dangling commit 7281251ddd2a61e38657c827739c57015671a6b3<br>
583dangling commit 2706a059f258c6b245f298dc4ff2ccd30ec21a63<br>
584dangling commit 13472b7c4b80851a1bc551779171dcb03655e9b5<br>
585dangling blob 218761f9d90712d37a9c5e36f406f92202db07eb<br>
586dangling commit bf093535a34a4d35731aa2bd90fe6b176302f14f<br>
587dangling commit 8e4bec7f2ddaa268bef999853c25755452100f8e<br>
588dangling tree d50bb86186bf27b681d25af89d3b5b68382e4085<br>
589dangling tree b24c2473f1fd3d91352a624795be026d64c8841f<br>
590...</p></div><p>Dangling objects are objects that are harmless, but also unnecessary;
591you can remove them at any time with <a href="git-prune.html" target="_top">git-prune(1)</a> or the &#8212;prune
592option to <a href="git-gc.html" target="_top">git-gc(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git gc --prune</p></div><p>This may be time-consuming. Unlike most other git operations (including
593git-gc when run without any options), it is not safe to prune while
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41594other git operations are in progress in the same repository.</p><p>For more about dangling objects, see <a href="#dangling-objects" title="Dangling objects">the section called &#8220;Dangling objects&#8221;</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id275832"></a>Recovering lost changes</h3></div></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h4 class="title"><a name="id275838"></a>Reflogs</h4></div></div></div><p>Say you modify a branch with <a href="git-reset.html" target="_top">git-reset(1)</a> &#8212;hard, and then
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22595realize that the branch was the only reference you had to that point in
596history.</p><p>Fortunately, git also keeps a log, called a "reflog", of all the
597previous values of each branch. So in this case you can still find the
598old history using, for example,</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git log master@{1}</p></div><p>This lists the commits reachable from the previous version of the head.
599This syntax can be used to with any git command that accepts a commit,
600not just with git log. Some other examples:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show master@{2}           # See where the branch pointed 2,<br>
601$ git show master@{3}           # 3, ... changes ago.<br>
602$ gitk master@{yesterday}       # See where it pointed yesterday,<br>
603$ gitk master@{"1 week ago"}    # ... or last week</p></div><p>The reflogs are kept by default for 30 days, after which they may be
604pruned. See <a href="git-reflog.html" target="_top">git-reflog(1)</a> and <a href="git-gc.html" target="_top">git-gc(1)</a> to learn
605how to control this pruning, and see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS"
606section of <a href="git-rev-parse.html" target="_top">git-rev-parse(1)</a> for details.</p><p>Note that the reflog history is very different from normal git history.
607While normal history is shared by every repository that works on the
608same project, the reflog history is not shared: it tells you only about
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41609how the branches in your local repository have changed over time.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h4 class="title"><a name="id275916"></a>Examining dangling objects</h4></div></div></div><p>In some situations the reflog may not be able to save you. For
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22610example, suppose you delete a branch, then realize you need the history
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52611it contained. The reflog is also deleted; however, if you have not
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22612yet pruned the repository, then you may still be able to find
613the lost commits; run git-fsck and watch for output that mentions
614"dangling commits":</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fsck<br>
615dangling commit 7281251ddd2a61e38657c827739c57015671a6b3<br>
616dangling commit 2706a059f258c6b245f298dc4ff2ccd30ec21a63<br>
617dangling commit 13472b7c4b80851a1bc551779171dcb03655e9b5<br>
Junio C Hamano39381a72007-02-02 07:35:15618...</p></div><p>You can examine
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22619one of those dangling commits with, for example,</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ gitk 7281251ddd --not --all</p></div><p>which does what it sounds like: it says that you want to see the commit
620history that is described by the dangling commit(s), but not the
621history that is described by all your existing branches and tags. Thus
622you get exactly the history reachable from that commit that is lost.
623(And notice that it might not be just one commit: we only report the
624"tip of the line" as being dangling, but there might be a whole deep
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52625and complex commit history that was dropped.)</p><p>If you decide you want the history back, you can always create a new
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41626reference pointing to it, for example, a new branch:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch recovered-branch 7281251ddd</p></div></div></div></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id275982"></a>Chapter 5. Sharing development with others</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#getting-updates-with-git-pull">Getting updates with git pull</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276114">Submitting patches to a project</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276163">Importing patches to a project</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#setting-up-a-public-repository">Setting up a public repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#exporting-via-http">Exporting a git repository via http</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#exporting-via-git">Exporting a git repository via the git protocol</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#pushing-changes-to-a-public-repository">Pushing changes to a public repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276576">Setting up a shared repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276595">Allow web browsing of a repository</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276608">Examples</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="getting-updates-with-git-pull"></a>Getting updates with git pull</h2></div></div></div><p>After you clone a repository and make a few changes of your own, you
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22627may wish to check the original repository for updates and merge them
628into your own work.</p><p>We have already seen <a href="#Updating-a-repository-with-git-fetch" title="Updating a repository with git fetch">how to keep remote tracking branches up to date</a> with <a href="git-fetch.html" target="_top">git-fetch(1)</a>,
629and how to merge two branches. So you can merge in changes from the
630original repository's master branch with:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch<br>
631$ git merge origin/master</p></div><p>However, the <a href="git-pull.html" target="_top">git-pull(1)</a> command provides a way to do this in
632one step:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git pull origin master</p></div><p>In fact, "origin" is normally the default repository to pull from,
633and the default branch is normally the HEAD of the remote repository,
634so often you can accomplish the above with just</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git pull</p></div><p>See the descriptions of the branch.&lt;name&gt;.remote and
635branch.&lt;name&gt;.merge options in <a href="git-config.html" target="_top">git-config(1)</a> to learn
636how to control these defaults depending on the current branch.</p><p>In addition to saving you keystrokes, "git pull" also helps you by
637producing a default commit message documenting the branch and
638repository that you pulled from.</p><p>(But note that no such commit will be created in the case of a
639<a href="#fast-forwards" title="Understanding git history: fast-forwards">fast forward</a>; instead, your branch will just be
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52640updated to point to the latest commit from the upstream branch.)</p><p>The git-pull command can also be given "." as the "remote" repository,
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22641in which case it just merges in a branch from the current repository; so
642the commands</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git pull . branch<br>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41643$ git merge branch</p></div><p>are roughly equivalent. The former is actually very commonly used.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276114"></a>Submitting patches to a project</h2></div></div></div><p>If you just have a few changes, the simplest way to submit them may
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22644just be to send them as patches in email:</p><p>First, use <a href="git-format-patch.html" target="_top">git-format-patch(1)</a>; for example:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git format-patch origin</p></div><p>will produce a numbered series of files in the current directory, one
645for each patch in the current branch but not in origin/HEAD.</p><p>You can then import these into your mail client and send them by
646hand. However, if you have a lot to send at once, you may prefer to
647use the <a href="git-send-email.html" target="_top">git-send-email(1)</a> script to automate the process.
648Consult the mailing list for your project first to determine how they
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41649prefer such patches be handled.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276163"></a>Importing patches to a project</h2></div></div></div><p>Git also provides a tool called <a href="git-am.html" target="_top">git-am(1)</a> (am stands for
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22650"apply mailbox"), for importing such an emailed series of patches.
651Just save all of the patch-containing messages, in order, into a
652single mailbox file, say "patches.mbox", then run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git am -3 patches.mbox</p></div><p>Git will apply each patch in order; if any conflicts are found, it
653will stop, and you can fix the conflicts as described in
654"<a href="#resolving-a-merge" title="Resolving a merge">Resolving a merge</a>". (The "-3" option tells
655git to perform a merge; if you would prefer it just to abort and
656leave your tree and index untouched, you may omit that option.)</p><p>Once the index is updated with the results of the conflict
657resolution, instead of creating a new commit, just run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git am --resolved</p></div><p>and git will create the commit for you and continue applying the
658remaining patches from the mailbox.</p><p>The final result will be a series of commits, one for each patch in
659the original mailbox, with authorship and commit log message each
660taken from the message containing each patch.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="setting-up-a-public-repository"></a>Setting up a public repository</h2></div></div></div><p>Another way to submit changes to a project is to simply tell the
661maintainer of that project to pull from your repository, exactly as
662you did in the section "<a href="#getting-updates-with-git-pull" title="Getting updates with git pull">Getting updates with git pull</a>".</p><p>If you and maintainer both have accounts on the same machine, then
663then you can just pull changes from each other's repositories
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52664directly; note that all of the commands (<a href="git-clone.html" target="_top">git-clone(1)</a>,
665git-fetch[1], git-pull[1], etc.) that accept a URL as an argument
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41666will also accept a local directory name; so, for example, you can
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22667use</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git clone /path/to/repository<br>
668$ git pull /path/to/other/repository</p></div><p>If this sort of setup is inconvenient or impossible, another (more
669common) option is to set up a public repository on a public server.
670This also allows you to cleanly separate private work in progress
671from publicly visible work.</p><p>You will continue to do your day-to-day work in your personal
672repository, but periodically "push" changes from your personal
673repository into your public repository, allowing other developers to
674pull from that repository. So the flow of changes, in a situation
675where there is one other developer with a public repository, looks
676like this:</p><pre class="literallayout"> you push
677your personal repo ------------------&gt; your public repo
678 ^ |
679 | |
680 | you pull | they pull
681 | |
682 | |
683 | they push V
684their public repo &lt;------------------- their repo</pre><p>Now, assume your personal repository is in the directory ~/proj. We
685first create a new clone of the repository:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git clone --bare proj-clone.git</p></div><p>The resulting directory proj-clone.git will contains a "bare" git
686repository&#8212;it is just the contents of the ".git" directory, without
687a checked-out copy of a working directory.</p><p>Next, copy proj-clone.git to the server where you plan to host the
688public repository. You can use scp, rsync, or whatever is most
689convenient.</p><p>If somebody else maintains the public server, they may already have
690set up a git service for you, and you may skip to the section
691"<a href="#pushing-changes-to-a-public-repository" title="Pushing changes to a public repository">Pushing changes to a public repository</a>", below.</p><p>Otherwise, the following sections explain how to export your newly
692created public repository:</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="exporting-via-http"></a>Exporting a git repository via http</h2></div></div></div><p>The git protocol gives better performance and reliability, but on a
693host with a web server set up, http exports may be simpler to set up.</p><p>All you need to do is place the newly created bare git repository in
694a directory that is exported by the web server, and make some
695adjustments to give web clients some extra information they need:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ mv proj.git /home/you/public_html/proj.git<br>
696$ cd proj.git<br>
697$ git update-server-info<br>
698$ chmod a+x hooks/post-update</p></div><p>(For an explanation of the last two lines, see
699<a href="git-update-server-info.html" target="_top">git-update-server-info(1)</a>, and the documentation
700<a href="hooks.txt" target="_top">Hooks used by git</a>.)</p><p>Advertise the url of proj.git. Anybody else should then be able to
701clone or pull from that url, for example with a commandline like:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git clone http://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git</p></div><p>(See also
702<a href="howto/setup-git-server-over-http.txt" target="_top">setup-git-server-over-http</a>
703for a slightly more sophisticated setup using WebDAV which also
704allows pushing over http.)</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="exporting-via-git"></a>Exporting a git repository via the git protocol</h2></div></div></div><p>This is the preferred method.</p><p>For now, we refer you to the <a href="git-daemon.html" target="_top">git-daemon(1)</a> man page for
705instructions. (See especially the examples section.)</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="pushing-changes-to-a-public-repository"></a>Pushing changes to a public repository</h2></div></div></div><p>Note that the two techniques outline above (exporting via
706<a href="#exporting-via-http" title="Exporting a git repository via http">http</a> or <a href="#exporting-via-git" title="Exporting a git repository via the git protocol">git</a>) allow other
707maintainers to fetch your latest changes, but they do not allow write
708access, which you will need to update the public repository with the
709latest changes created in your private repository.</p><p>The simplest way to do this is using <a href="git-push.html" target="_top">git-push(1)</a> and ssh; to
710update the remote branch named "master" with the latest state of your
711branch named "master", run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git push ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git master:master</p></div><p>or just</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git push ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git master</p></div><p>As with git-fetch, git-push will complain if this does not result in
712a <a href="#fast-forwards" title="Understanding git history: fast-forwards">fast forward</a>. Normally this is a sign of
713something wrong. However, if you are sure you know what you're
714doing, you may force git-push to perform the update anyway by
715proceeding the branch name by a plus sign:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git push ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git +master</p></div><p>As with git-fetch, you may also set up configuration options to
716save typing; so, for example, after</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ cat &gt;.git/config &lt;&lt;EOF<br>
717[remote "public-repo"]<br>
718        url = ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git<br>
719EOF</p></div><p>you should be able to perform the above push with just</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git push public-repo master</p></div><p>See the explanations of the remote.&lt;name&gt;.url, branch.&lt;name&gt;.remote,
720and remote.&lt;name&gt;.push options in <a href="git-config.html" target="_top">git-config(1)</a> for
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41721details.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276576"></a>Setting up a shared repository</h2></div></div></div><p>Another way to collaborate is by using a model similar to that
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22722commonly used in CVS, where several developers with special rights
723all push to and pull from a single shared repository. See
724<a href="cvs-migration.txt" target="_top">git for CVS users</a> for instructions on how to
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41725set this up.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276595"></a>Allow web browsing of a repository</h2></div></div></div><p>The gitweb cgi script provides users an easy way to browse your
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22726project's files and history without having to install git; see the file
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41727gitweb/README in the git source tree for instructions on setting it up.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276608"></a>Examples</h2></div></div></div><p>TODO: topic branches, typical roles as in everyday.txt, ?</p></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="cleaning-up-history"></a>Chapter 6. Rewriting history and maintaining patch series</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276640">Creating the perfect patch series</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276714">Keeping a patch series up to date using git-rebase</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276845">Modifying a single commit</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276935">Reordering or selecting from a patch series</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id276995">Other tools</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277008">Problems with rewriting history</a></span></dt></dl></div><p>Normally commits are only added to a project, never taken away or
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22728replaced. Git is designed with this assumption, and violating it will
729cause git's merge machinery (for example) to do the wrong thing.</p><p>However, there is a situation in which it can be useful to violate this
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41730assumption.</p><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276640"></a>Creating the perfect patch series</h2></div></div></div><p>Suppose you are a contributor to a large project, and you want to add a
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22731complicated feature, and to present it to the other developers in a way
732that makes it easy for them to read your changes, verify that they are
733correct, and understand why you made each change.</p><p>If you present all of your changes as a single patch (or commit), they
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52734may find that it is too much to digest all at once.</p><p>If you present them with the entire history of your work, complete with
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22735mistakes, corrections, and dead ends, they may be overwhelmed.</p><p>So the ideal is usually to produce a series of patches such that:</p><div class="orderedlist"><ol type="1"><li>
736Each patch can be applied in order.
737</li><li>
738Each patch includes a single logical change, together with a
739 message explaining the change.
740</li><li>
741No patch introduces a regression: after applying any initial
742 part of the series, the resulting project still compiles and
743 works, and has no bugs that it didn't have before.
744</li><li>
745The complete series produces the same end result as your own
746 (probably much messier!) development process did.
747</li></ol></div><p>We will introduce some tools that can help you do this, explain how to
748use them, and then explain some of the problems that can arise because
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41749you are rewriting history.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276714"></a>Keeping a patch series up to date using git-rebase</h2></div></div></div><p>Suppose that you create a branch "mywork" on a remote-tracking branch
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52750"origin", and create some commits on top of it:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout -b mywork origin<br>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22751$ vi file.txt<br>
752$ git commit<br>
753$ vi otherfile.txt<br>
754$ git commit<br>
755...</p></div><p>You have performed no merges into mywork, so it is just a simple linear
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20756sequence of patches on top of "origin":</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--o &lt;-- origin
757 \
758 o--o--o &lt;-- mywork</pre><p>Some more interesting work has been done in the upstream project, and
759"origin" has advanced:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--O--o--o--o &lt;-- origin
760 \
761 a--b--c &lt;-- mywork</pre><p>At this point, you could use "pull" to merge your changes back in;
762the result would create a new merge commit, like this:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--O--o--o--o &lt;-- origin
763 \ \
764 a--b--c--m &lt;-- mywork</pre><p>However, if you prefer to keep the history in mywork a simple series of
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22765commits without any merges, you may instead choose to use
766<a href="git-rebase.html" target="_top">git-rebase(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout mywork<br>
767$ git rebase origin</p></div><p>This will remove each of your commits from mywork, temporarily saving
768them as patches (in a directory named ".dotest"), update mywork to
769point at the latest version of origin, then apply each of the saved
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20770patches to the new mywork. The result will look like:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--O--o--o--o &lt;-- origin
771 \
772 a'--b'--c' &lt;-- mywork</pre><p>In the process, it may discover conflicts. In that case it will stop
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22773and allow you to fix the conflicts; after fixing conflicts, use "git
774add" to update the index with those contents, and then, instead of
775running git-commit, just run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git rebase --continue</p></div><p>and git will continue applying the rest of the patches.</p><p>At any point you may use the &#8212;abort option to abort this process and
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41776return mywork to the state it had before you started the rebase:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git rebase --abort</p></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276845"></a>Modifying a single commit</h2></div></div></div><p>We saw in <a href="#fixing-a-mistake-by-editing-history" title="Fixing a mistake by editing history">the section called &#8220;Fixing a mistake by editing history&#8221;</a> that you can replace the
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:29777most recent commit using</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git commit --amend</p></div><p>which will replace the old commit by a new commit incorporating your
778changes, giving you a chance to edit the old commit message first.</p><p>You can also use a combination of this and <a href="git-rebase.html" target="_top">git-rebase(1)</a> to edit
779commits further back in your history. First, tag the problematic commit with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git tag bad mywork~5</p></div><p>(Either gitk or git-log may be useful for finding the commit.)</p><p>Then check out a new branch at that commit, edit it, and rebase the rest of
780the series on top of it:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout -b TMP bad<br>
781$ # make changes here and update the index<br>
782$ git commit --amend<br>
783$ git rebase --onto TMP bad mywork</p></div><p>When you're done, you'll be left with mywork checked out, with the top patches
784on mywork reapplied on top of the modified commit you created in TMP. You can
785then clean up with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git branch -d TMP<br>
786$ git tag -d bad</p></div><p>Note that the immutable nature of git history means that you haven't really
787"modified" existing commits; instead, you have replaced the old commits with
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41788new commits having new object names.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276935"></a>Reordering or selecting from a patch series</h2></div></div></div><p>Given one existing commit, the <a href="git-cherry-pick.html" target="_top">git-cherry-pick(1)</a> command
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22789allows you to apply the change introduced by that commit and create a
790new commit that records it. So, for example, if "mywork" points to a
791series of patches on top of "origin", you might do something like:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git checkout -b mywork-new origin<br>
792$ gitk origin..mywork &amp;</p></div><p>And browse through the list of patches in the mywork branch using gitk,
793applying them (possibly in a different order) to mywork-new using
794cherry-pick, and possibly modifying them as you go using commit
795&#8212;amend.</p><p>Another technique is to use git-format-patch to create a series of
796patches, then reset the state to before the patches:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git format-patch origin<br>
797$ git reset --hard origin</p></div><p>Then modify, reorder, or eliminate patches as preferred before applying
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41798them again with <a href="git-am.html" target="_top">git-am(1)</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id276995"></a>Other tools</h2></div></div></div><p>There are numerous other tools, such as stgit, which exist for the
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52799purpose of maintaining a patch series. These are outside of the scope of
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41800this manual.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277008"></a>Problems with rewriting history</h2></div></div></div><p>The primary problem with rewriting the history of a branch has to do
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22801with merging. Suppose somebody fetches your branch and merges it into
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20802their branch, with a result something like this:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--O--o--o--o &lt;-- origin
803 \ \
804 t--t--t--m &lt;-- their branch:</pre><p>Then suppose you modify the last three commits:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--o &lt;-- new head of origin
805 /
806 o--o--O--o--o--o &lt;-- old head of origin</pre><p>If we examined all this history together in one repository, it will
807look like:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--o &lt;-- new head of origin
808 /
809 o--o--O--o--o--o &lt;-- old head of origin
810 \ \
811 t--t--t--m &lt;-- their branch:</pre><p>Git has no way of knowing that the new head is an updated version of
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22812the old head; it treats this situation exactly the same as it would if
813two developers had independently done the work on the old and new heads
814in parallel. At this point, if someone attempts to merge the new head
815in to their branch, git will attempt to merge together the two (old and
816new) lines of development, instead of trying to replace the old by the
817new. The results are likely to be unexpected.</p><p>You may still choose to publish branches whose history is rewritten,
818and it may be useful for others to be able to fetch those branches in
819order to examine or test them, but they should not attempt to pull such
820branches into their own work.</p><p>For true distributed development that supports proper merging,
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41821published branches should never be rewritten.</p></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id277079"></a>Chapter 7. Advanced branch management</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277085">Fetching individual branches</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#fast-forwards">Understanding git history: fast-forwards</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277205">Forcing git fetch to do non-fast-forward updates</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277232">Configuring remote branches</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277085"></a>Fetching individual branches</h2></div></div></div><p>Instead of using <a href="git-remote.html" target="_top">git-remote(1)</a>, you can also choose just
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22822to update one branch at a time, and to store it locally under an
823arbitrary name:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch origin todo:my-todo-work</p></div><p>The first argument, "origin", just tells git to fetch from the
824repository you originally cloned from. The second argument tells git
825to fetch the branch named "todo" from the remote repository, and to
826store it locally under the name refs/heads/my-todo-work.</p><p>You can also fetch branches from other repositories; so</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git master:example-master</p></div><p>will create a new branch named "example-master" and store in it the
827branch named "master" from the repository at the given URL. If you
828already have a branch named example-master, it will attempt to
829"fast-forward" to the commit given by example.com's master branch. So
830next we explain what a fast-forward is:</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="fast-forwards"></a>Understanding git history: fast-forwards</h2></div></div></div><p>In the previous example, when updating an existing branch, "git
831fetch" checks to make sure that the most recent commit on the remote
832branch is a descendant of the most recent commit on your copy of the
833branch before updating your copy of the branch to point at the new
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20834commit. Git calls this process a "fast forward".</p><p>A fast forward looks something like this:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--o--o &lt;-- old head of the branch
835 \
836 o--o--o &lt;-- new head of the branch</pre><p>In some cases it is possible that the new head will <span class="strong"><strong>not</strong></span> actually be
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22837a descendant of the old head. For example, the developer may have
838realized she made a serious mistake, and decided to backtrack,
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20839resulting in a situation like:</p><pre class="literallayout"> o--o--o--o--a--b &lt;-- old head of the branch
840 \
841 o--o--o &lt;-- new head of the branch</pre><p>In this case, "git fetch" will fail, and print out a warning.</p><p>In that case, you can still force git to update to the new head, as
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22842described in the following section. However, note that in the
843situation above this may mean losing the commits labeled "a" and "b",
844unless you've already created a reference of your own pointing to
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41845them.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277205"></a>Forcing git fetch to do non-fast-forward updates</h2></div></div></div><p>If git fetch fails because the new head of a branch is not a
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52846descendant of the old head, you may force the update with:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git +master:refs/remotes/example/master</p></div><p>Note the addition of the "+" sign. Be aware that commits that the
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22847old version of example/master pointed at may be lost, as we saw in
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41848the previous section.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277232"></a>Configuring remote branches</h2></div></div></div><p>We saw above that "origin" is just a shortcut to refer to the
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:52849repository that you originally cloned from. This information is
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22850stored in git configuration variables, which you can see using
851<a href="git-config.html" target="_top">git-config(1)</a>:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git config -l<br>
852core.repositoryformatversion=0<br>
853core.filemode=true<br>
854core.logallrefupdates=true<br>
855remote.origin.url=git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git<br>
856remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*<br>
857branch.master.remote=origin<br>
858branch.master.merge=refs/heads/master</p></div><p>If there are other repositories that you also use frequently, you can
859create similar configuration options to save typing; for example,
860after</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git config remote.example.url git://example.com/proj.git</p></div><p>then the following two commands will do the same thing:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git master:refs/remotes/example/master<br>
861$ git fetch example master:refs/remotes/example/master</p></div><p>Even better, if you add one more option:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git config remote.example.fetch master:refs/remotes/example/master</p></div><p>then the following commands will all do the same thing:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git master:ref/remotes/example/master<br>
862$ git fetch example master:ref/remotes/example/master<br>
863$ git fetch example example/master<br>
864$ git fetch example</p></div><p>You can also add a "+" to force the update each time:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git config remote.example.fetch +master:ref/remotes/example/master</p></div><p>Don't do this unless you're sure you won't mind "git fetch" possibly
865throwing away commits on mybranch.</p><p>Also note that all of the above configuration can be performed by
866directly editing the file .git/config instead of using
867<a href="git-config.html" target="_top">git-config(1)</a>.</p><p>See <a href="git-config.html" target="_top">git-config(1)</a> for more details on the configuration
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41868options mentioned above.</p></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="git-internals"></a>Chapter 8. Git internals</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277370">The Object Database</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277486">Blob Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277529">Tree Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id232240">Commit Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277722">Trust</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277772">Tag Object</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277818">The "index" aka "Current Directory Cache"</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277894">The Workflow</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id277912">working directory -&gt; index</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278002">index -&gt; object database</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278030">object database -&gt; index</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278061">index -&gt; working directory</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278125">Tying it all together</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278219">Examining the data</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278297">Merging multiple trees</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278385">Merging multiple trees, continued</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#id278645">How git stores objects efficiently: pack files</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="#dangling-objects">Dangling objects</a></span></dt></dl></div><p>There are two object abstractions: the "object database", and the
869"current directory cache" aka "index".</p><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277370"></a>The Object Database</h2></div></div></div><p>The object database is literally just a content-addressable collection
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22870of objects. All objects are named by their content, which is
871approximated by the SHA1 hash of the object itself. Objects may refer
872to other objects (by referencing their SHA1 hash), and so you can
873build up a hierarchy of objects.</p><p>All objects have a statically determined "type" aka "tag", which is
874determined at object creation time, and which identifies the format of
875the object (i.e. how it is used, and how it can refer to other
876objects). There are currently four different object types: "blob",
877"tree", "commit" and "tag".</p><p>A "blob" object cannot refer to any other object, and is, like the type
878implies, a pure storage object containing some user data. It is used to
879actually store the file data, i.e. a blob object is associated with some
880particular version of some file.</p><p>A "tree" object is an object that ties one or more "blob" objects into a
881directory structure. In addition, a tree object can refer to other tree
882objects, thus creating a directory hierarchy.</p><p>A "commit" object ties such directory hierarchies together into
883a DAG of revisions - each "commit" is associated with exactly one tree
884(the directory hierarchy at the time of the commit). In addition, a
885"commit" refers to one or more "parent" commit objects that describe the
886history of how we arrived at that directory hierarchy.</p><p>As a special case, a commit object with no parents is called the "root"
887object, and is the point of an initial project commit. Each project
888must have at least one root, and while you can tie several different
889root objects together into one project by creating a commit object which
890has two or more separate roots as its ultimate parents, that's probably
891just going to confuse people. So aim for the notion of "one root object
892per project", even if git itself does not enforce that.</p><p>A "tag" object symbolically identifies and can be used to sign other
893objects. It contains the identifier and type of another object, a
894symbolic name (of course!) and, optionally, a signature.</p><p>Regardless of object type, all objects share the following
895characteristics: they are all deflated with zlib, and have a header
896that not only specifies their type, but also provides size information
897about the data in the object. It's worth noting that the SHA1 hash
898that is used to name the object is the hash of the original data
899plus this header, so <code class="literal">sha1sum</code> <span class="emphasis"><em>file</em></span> does not match the object name
900for <span class="emphasis"><em>file</em></span>.
901(Historical note: in the dawn of the age of git the hash
902was the sha1 of the <span class="emphasis"><em>compressed</em></span> object.)</p><p>As a result, the general consistency of an object can always be tested
903independently of the contents or the type of the object: all objects can
904be validated by verifying that (a) their hashes match the content of the
905file and (b) the object successfully inflates to a stream of bytes that
906forms a sequence of &lt;ascii type without space&gt; + &lt;space&gt; + &lt;ascii decimal
907size&gt; + &lt;byte\0&gt; + &lt;binary object data&gt;.</p><p>The structured objects can further have their structure and
908connectivity to other objects verified. This is generally done with
909the <code class="literal">git-fsck</code> program, which generates a full dependency graph
910of all objects, and verifies their internal consistency (in addition
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41911to just verifying their superficial consistency through the hash).</p><p>The object types in some more detail:</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277486"></a>Blob Object</h2></div></div></div><p>A "blob" object is nothing but a binary blob of data, and doesn't
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22912refer to anything else. There is no signature or any other
913verification of the data, so while the object is consistent (it <span class="emphasis"><em>is</em></span>
914indexed by its sha1 hash, so the data itself is certainly correct), it
915has absolutely no other attributes. No name associations, no
916permissions. It is purely a blob of data (i.e. normally "file
917contents").</p><p>In particular, since the blob is entirely defined by its data, if two
918files in a directory tree (or in multiple different versions of the
919repository) have the same contents, they will share the same blob
920object. The object is totally independent of its location in the
921directory tree, and renaming a file does not change the object that
922file is associated with in any way.</p><p>A blob is typically created when <a href="git-update-index.html" target="_top">git-update-index(1)</a>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41923is run, and its data can be accessed by <a href="git-cat-file.html" target="_top">git-cat-file(1)</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277529"></a>Tree Object</h2></div></div></div><p>The next hierarchical object type is the "tree" object. A tree object
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22924is a list of mode/name/blob data, sorted by name. Alternatively, the
925mode data may specify a directory mode, in which case instead of
926naming a blob, that name is associated with another TREE object.</p><p>Like the "blob" object, a tree object is uniquely determined by the
927set contents, and so two separate but identical trees will always
928share the exact same object. This is true at all levels, i.e. it's
929true for a "leaf" tree (which does not refer to any other trees, only
930blobs) as well as for a whole subdirectory.</p><p>For that reason a "tree" object is just a pure data abstraction: it
931has no history, no signatures, no verification of validity, except
932that since the contents are again protected by the hash itself, we can
933trust that the tree is immutable and its contents never change.</p><p>So you can trust the contents of a tree to be valid, the same way you
934can trust the contents of a blob, but you don't know where those
935contents <span class="emphasis"><em>came</em></span> from.</p><p>Side note on trees: since a "tree" object is a sorted list of
936"filename+content", you can create a diff between two trees without
937actually having to unpack two trees. Just ignore all common parts,
938and your diff will look right. In other words, you can effectively
939(and efficiently) tell the difference between any two random trees by
940O(n) where "n" is the size of the difference, rather than the size of
941the tree.</p><p>Side note 2 on trees: since the name of a "blob" depends entirely and
942exclusively on its contents (i.e. there are no names or permissions
943involved), you can see trivial renames or permission changes by
944noticing that the blob stayed the same. However, renames with data
945changes need a smarter "diff" implementation.</p><p>A tree is created with <a href="git-write-tree.html" target="_top">git-write-tree(1)</a> and
946its data can be accessed by <a href="git-ls-tree.html" target="_top">git-ls-tree(1)</a>.
Junio C Hamanoc51fede2007-03-12 07:29:20947Two trees can be compared with <a href="git-diff-tree.html" target="_top">git-diff-tree(1)</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id232240"></a>Commit Object</h2></div></div></div><p>The "commit" object is an object that introduces the notion of
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22948history into the picture. In contrast to the other objects, it
949doesn't just describe the physical state of a tree, it describes how
950we got there, and why.</p><p>A "commit" is defined by the tree-object that it results in, the
951parent commits (zero, one or more) that led up to that point, and a
952comment on what happened. Again, a commit is not trusted per se:
953the contents are well-defined and "safe" due to the cryptographically
954strong signatures at all levels, but there is no reason to believe
955that the tree is "good" or that the merge information makes sense.
956The parents do not have to actually have any relationship with the
957result, for example.</p><p>Note on commits: unlike real SCM's, commits do not contain
958rename information or file mode change information. All of that is
959implicit in the trees involved (the result tree, and the result trees
960of the parents), and describing that makes no sense in this idiotic
961file manager.</p><p>A commit is created with <a href="git-commit-tree.html" target="_top">git-commit-tree(1)</a> and
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41962its data can be accessed by <a href="git-cat-file.html" target="_top">git-cat-file(1)</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277722"></a>Trust</h2></div></div></div><p>An aside on the notion of "trust". Trust is really outside the scope
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22963of "git", but it's worth noting a few things. First off, since
964everything is hashed with SHA1, you <span class="emphasis"><em>can</em></span> trust that an object is
965intact and has not been messed with by external sources. So the name
966of an object uniquely identifies a known state - just not a state that
967you may want to trust.</p><p>Furthermore, since the SHA1 signature of a commit refers to the
968SHA1 signatures of the tree it is associated with and the signatures
969of the parent, a single named commit specifies uniquely a whole set
970of history, with full contents. You can't later fake any step of the
971way once you have the name of a commit.</p><p>So to introduce some real trust in the system, the only thing you need
972to do is to digitally sign just <span class="emphasis"><em>one</em></span> special note, which includes the
973name of a top-level commit. Your digital signature shows others
974that you trust that commit, and the immutability of the history of
975commits tells others that they can trust the whole history.</p><p>In other words, you can easily validate a whole archive by just
976sending out a single email that tells the people the name (SHA1 hash)
977of the top commit, and digitally sign that email using something
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41978like GPG/PGP.</p><p>To assist in this, git also provides the tag object&#8230;</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277772"></a>Tag Object</h2></div></div></div><p>Git provides the "tag" object to simplify creating, managing and
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22979exchanging symbolic and signed tokens. The "tag" object at its
980simplest simply symbolically identifies another object by containing
981the sha1, type and symbolic name.</p><p>However it can optionally contain additional signature information
982(which git doesn't care about as long as there's less than 8k of
983it). This can then be verified externally to git.</p><p>Note that despite the tag features, "git" itself only handles content
984integrity; the trust framework (and signature provision and
985verification) has to come from outside.</p><p>A tag is created with <a href="git-mktag.html" target="_top">git-mktag(1)</a>,
986its data can be accessed by <a href="git-cat-file.html" target="_top">git-cat-file(1)</a>,
987and the signature can be verified by
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:41988<a href="git-verify-tag.html" target="_top">git-verify-tag(1)</a>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277818"></a>The "index" aka "Current Directory Cache"</h2></div></div></div><p>The index is a simple binary file, which contains an efficient
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:22989representation of a virtual directory content at some random time. It
990does so by a simple array that associates a set of names, dates,
991permissions and content (aka "blob") objects together. The cache is
992always kept ordered by name, and names are unique (with a few very
993specific rules) at any point in time, but the cache has no long-term
994meaning, and can be partially updated at any time.</p><p>In particular, the index certainly does not need to be consistent with
995the current directory contents (in fact, most operations will depend on
996different ways to make the index <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> be consistent with the directory
997hierarchy), but it has three very important attributes:</p><p><span class="emphasis"><em>(a) it can re-generate the full state it caches (not just the
998directory structure: it contains pointers to the "blob" objects so
999that it can regenerate the data too)</em></span></p><p>As a special case, there is a clear and unambiguous one-way mapping
1000from a current directory cache to a "tree object", which can be
1001efficiently created from just the current directory cache without
1002actually looking at any other data. So a directory cache at any one
1003time uniquely specifies one and only one "tree" object (but has
1004additional data to make it easy to match up that tree object with what
1005has happened in the directory)</p><p><span class="emphasis"><em>(b) it has efficient methods for finding inconsistencies between that
1006cached state ("tree object waiting to be instantiated") and the
1007current state.</em></span></p><p><span class="emphasis"><em>(c) it can additionally efficiently represent information about merge
1008conflicts between different tree objects, allowing each pathname to be
1009associated with sufficient information about the trees involved that
Junio C Hamanodb911ee2007-02-28 08:13:521010you can create a three-way merge between them.</em></span></p><p>Those are the ONLY three things that the directory cache does. It's a
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221011cache, and the normal operation is to re-generate it completely from a
1012known tree object, or update/compare it with a live tree that is being
1013developed. If you blow the directory cache away entirely, you generally
1014haven't lost any information as long as you have the name of the tree
1015that it described.</p><p>At the same time, the index is at the same time also the
1016staging area for creating new trees, and creating a new tree always
1017involves a controlled modification of the index file. In particular,
1018the index file can have the representation of an intermediate tree that
1019has not yet been instantiated. So the index can be thought of as a
1020write-back cache, which can contain dirty information that has not yet
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411021been written back to the backing store.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id277894"></a>The Workflow</h2></div></div></div><p>Generally, all "git" operations work on the index file. Some operations
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221022work <span class="strong"><strong>purely</strong></span> on the index file (showing the current state of the
1023index), but most operations move data to and from the index file. Either
1024from the database or from the working directory. Thus there are four
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411025main combinations:</p><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id277912"></a>working directory -&gt; index</h3></div></div></div><p>You update the index with information from the working directory with
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221026the <a href="git-update-index.html" target="_top">git-update-index(1)</a> command. You
1027generally update the index information by just specifying the filename
1028you want to update, like so:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-update-index filename</p></div><p>but to avoid common mistakes with filename globbing etc, the command
1029will not normally add totally new entries or remove old entries,
1030i.e. it will normally just update existing cache entries.</p><p>To tell git that yes, you really do realize that certain files no
1031longer exist, or that new files should be added, you
1032should use the <code class="literal">&#8212;remove</code> and <code class="literal">&#8212;add</code> flags respectively.</p><p>NOTE! A <code class="literal">&#8212;remove</code> flag does <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> mean that subsequent filenames will
1033necessarily be removed: if the files still exist in your directory
1034structure, the index will be updated with their new status, not
1035removed. The only thing <code class="literal">&#8212;remove</code> means is that update-cache will be
1036considering a removed file to be a valid thing, and if the file really
1037does not exist any more, it will update the index accordingly.</p><p>As a special case, you can also do <code class="literal">git-update-index &#8212;refresh</code>, which
1038will refresh the "stat" information of each index to match the current
1039stat information. It will <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> update the object status itself, and
1040it will only update the fields that are used to quickly test whether
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411041an object still matches its old backing store object.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id278002"></a>index -&gt; object database</h3></div></div></div><p>You write your current index file to a "tree" object with the program</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-write-tree</p></div><p>that doesn't come with any options - it will just write out the
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221042current index into the set of tree objects that describe that state,
1043and it will return the name of the resulting top-level tree. You can
1044use that tree to re-generate the index at any time by going in the
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411045other direction:</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id278030"></a>object database -&gt; index</h3></div></div></div><p>You read a "tree" file from the object database, and use that to
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221046populate (and overwrite - don't do this if your index contains any
1047unsaved state that you might want to restore later!) your current
1048index. Normal operation is just</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-read-tree &lt;sha1 of tree&gt;</p></div><p>and your index file will now be equivalent to the tree that you saved
1049earlier. However, that is only your <span class="emphasis"><em>index</em></span> file: your working
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411050directory contents have not been modified.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id278061"></a>index -&gt; working directory</h3></div></div></div><p>You update your working directory from the index by "checking out"
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221051files. This is not a very common operation, since normally you'd just
1052keep your files updated, and rather than write to your working
1053directory, you'd tell the index files about the changes in your
1054working directory (i.e. <code class="literal">git-update-index</code>).</p><p>However, if you decide to jump to a new version, or check out somebody
1055else's version, or just restore a previous tree, you'd populate your
1056index file with read-tree, and then you need to check out the result
1057with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-checkout-index filename</p></div><p>or, if you want to check out all of the index, use <code class="literal">-a</code>.</p><p>NOTE! git-checkout-index normally refuses to overwrite old files, so
1058if you have an old version of the tree already checked out, you will
1059need to use the "-f" flag (<span class="emphasis"><em>before</em></span> the "-a" flag or the filename) to
1060<span class="emphasis"><em>force</em></span> the checkout.</p><p>Finally, there are a few odds and ends which are not purely moving
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411061from one representation to the other:</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title"><a name="id278125"></a>Tying it all together</h3></div></div></div><p>To commit a tree you have instantiated with "git-write-tree", you'd
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221062create a "commit" object that refers to that tree and the history
1063behind it - most notably the "parent" commits that preceded it in
1064history.</p><p>Normally a "commit" has one parent: the previous state of the tree
1065before a certain change was made. However, sometimes it can have two
1066or more parent commits, in which case we call it a "merge", due to the
1067fact that such a commit brings together ("merges") two or more
1068previous states represented by other commits.</p><p>In other words, while a "tree" represents a particular directory state
1069of a working directory, a "commit" represents that state in "time",
1070and explains how we got there.</p><p>You create a commit object by giving it the tree that describes the
1071state at the time of the commit, and a list of parents:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-commit-tree &lt;tree&gt; -p &lt;parent&gt; [-p &lt;parent2&gt; ..]</p></div><p>and then giving the reason for the commit on stdin (either through
1072redirection from a pipe or file, or by just typing it at the tty).</p><p>git-commit-tree will return the name of the object that represents
1073that commit, and you should save it away for later use. Normally,
1074you'd commit a new <code class="literal">HEAD</code> state, and while git doesn't care where you
1075save the note about that state, in practice we tend to just write the
1076result to the file pointed at by <code class="literal">.git/HEAD</code>, so that we can always see
1077what the last committed state was.</p><p>Here is an ASCII art by Jon Loeliger that illustrates how
1078various pieces fit together.</p><div class="literallayout"><p><br>
1079                     commit-tree<br>
1080                      commit obj<br>
1081                       +----+<br>
1082                       |    |<br>
1083                       |    |<br>
1084                       V    V<br>
1085                    +-----------+<br>
1086                    | Object DB |<br>
1087                    |  Backing  |<br>
1088                    |   Store   |<br>
1089                    +-----------+<br>
1090                       ^<br>
1091           write-tree  |     |<br>
1092             tree obj  |     |<br>
1093                       |     |  read-tree<br>
1094                       |     |  tree obj<br>
1095                             V<br>
1096                    +-----------+<br>
1097                    |   Index   |<br>
1098                    |  "cache"  |<br>
1099                    +-----------+<br>
1100         update-index  ^<br>
1101             blob obj  |     |<br>
1102                       |     |<br>
1103    checkout-index -u  |     |  checkout-index<br>
1104             stat      |     |  blob obj<br>
1105                             V<br>
1106                    +-----------+<br>
1107                    |  Working  |<br>
1108                    | Directory |<br>
1109                    +-----------+<br>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411110</p></div></div></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id278219"></a>Examining the data</h2></div></div></div><p>You can examine the data represented in the object database and the
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221111index with various helper tools. For every object, you can use
1112<a href="git-cat-file.html" target="_top">git-cat-file(1)</a> to examine details about the
1113object:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-cat-file -t &lt;objectname&gt;</p></div><p>shows the type of the object, and once you have the type (which is
1114usually implicit in where you find the object), you can use</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-cat-file blob|tree|commit|tag &lt;objectname&gt;</p></div><p>to show its contents. NOTE! Trees have binary content, and as a result
1115there is a special helper for showing that content, called
1116<code class="literal">git-ls-tree</code>, which turns the binary content into a more easily
1117readable form.</p><p>It's especially instructive to look at "commit" objects, since those
1118tend to be small and fairly self-explanatory. In particular, if you
1119follow the convention of having the top commit name in <code class="literal">.git/HEAD</code>,
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411120you can do</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-cat-file commit HEAD</p></div><p>to see what the top commit was.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id278297"></a>Merging multiple trees</h2></div></div></div><p>Git helps you do a three-way merge, which you can expand to n-way by
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221121repeating the merge procedure arbitrary times until you finally
1122"commit" the state. The normal situation is that you'd only do one
1123three-way merge (two parents), and commit it, but if you like to, you
1124can do multiple parents in one go.</p><p>To do a three-way merge, you need the two sets of "commit" objects
1125that you want to merge, use those to find the closest common parent (a
1126third "commit" object), and then use those commit objects to find the
1127state of the directory ("tree" object) at these points.</p><p>To get the "base" for the merge, you first look up the common parent
1128of two commits with</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-merge-base &lt;commit1&gt; &lt;commit2&gt;</p></div><p>which will return you the commit they are both based on. You should
1129now look up the "tree" objects of those commits, which you can easily
1130do with (for example)</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-cat-file commit &lt;commitname&gt; | head -1</p></div><p>since the tree object information is always the first line in a commit
1131object.</p><p>Once you know the three trees you are going to merge (the one "original"
1132tree, aka the common case, and the two "result" trees, aka the branches
1133you want to merge), you do a "merge" read into the index. This will
1134complain if it has to throw away your old index contents, so you should
1135make sure that you've committed those - in fact you would normally
1136always do a merge against your last commit (which should thus match what
1137you have in your current index anyway).</p><p>To do the merge, do</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-read-tree -m -u &lt;origtree&gt; &lt;yourtree&gt; &lt;targettree&gt;</p></div><p>which will do all trivial merge operations for you directly in the
1138index file, and you can just write the result out with
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411139<code class="literal">git-write-tree</code>.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id278385"></a>Merging multiple trees, continued</h2></div></div></div><p>Sadly, many merges aren't trivial. If there are files that have
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221140been added.moved or removed, or if both branches have modified the
1141same file, you will be left with an index tree that contains "merge
1142entries" in it. Such an index tree can <span class="emphasis"><em>NOT</em></span> be written out to a tree
1143object, and you will have to resolve any such merge clashes using
1144other tools before you can write out the result.</p><p>You can examine such index state with <code class="literal">git-ls-files &#8212;unmerged</code>
1145command. An example:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-read-tree -m $orig HEAD $target<br>
1146$ git-ls-files --unmerged<br>
1147100644 263414f423d0e4d70dae8fe53fa34614ff3e2860 1       hello.c<br>
1148100644 06fa6a24256dc7e560efa5687fa84b51f0263c3a 2       hello.c<br>
1149100644 cc44c73eb783565da5831b4d820c962954019b69 3       hello.c</p></div><p>Each line of the <code class="literal">git-ls-files &#8212;unmerged</code> output begins with
1150the blob mode bits, blob SHA1, <span class="emphasis"><em>stage number</em></span>, and the
1151filename. The <span class="emphasis"><em>stage number</em></span> is git's way to say which tree it
1152came from: stage 1 corresponds to <code class="literal">$orig</code> tree, stage 2 <code class="literal">HEAD</code>
1153tree, and stage3 <code class="literal">$target</code> tree.</p><p>Earlier we said that trivial merges are done inside
1154<code class="literal">git-read-tree -m</code>. For example, if the file did not change
1155from <code class="literal">$orig</code> to <code class="literal">HEAD</code> nor <code class="literal">$target</code>, or if the file changed
1156from <code class="literal">$orig</code> to <code class="literal">HEAD</code> and <code class="literal">$orig</code> to <code class="literal">$target</code> the same way,
1157obviously the final outcome is what is in <code class="literal">HEAD</code>. What the
1158above example shows is that file <code class="literal">hello.c</code> was changed from
1159<code class="literal">$orig</code> to <code class="literal">HEAD</code> and <code class="literal">$orig</code> to <code class="literal">$target</code> in a different way.
1160You could resolve this by running your favorite 3-way merge
1161program, e.g. <code class="literal">diff3</code> or <code class="literal">merge</code>, on the blob objects from
1162these three stages yourself, like this:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-cat-file blob 263414f... &gt;hello.c~1<br>
1163$ git-cat-file blob 06fa6a2... &gt;hello.c~2<br>
1164$ git-cat-file blob cc44c73... &gt;hello.c~3<br>
1165$ merge hello.c~2 hello.c~1 hello.c~3</p></div><p>This would leave the merge result in <code class="literal">hello.c~2</code> file, along
1166with conflict markers if there are conflicts. After verifying
1167the merge result makes sense, you can tell git what the final
1168merge result for this file is by:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ mv -f hello.c~2 hello.c<br>
1169$ git-update-index hello.c</p></div><p>When a path is in unmerged state, running <code class="literal">git-update-index</code> for
1170that path tells git to mark the path resolved.</p><p>The above is the description of a git merge at the lowest level,
1171to help you understand what conceptually happens under the hood.
1172In practice, nobody, not even git itself, uses three <code class="literal">git-cat-file</code>
1173for this. There is <code class="literal">git-merge-index</code> program that extracts the
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411174stages to temporary files and calls a "merge" script on it:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git-merge-index git-merge-one-file hello.c</p></div><p>and that is what higher level <code class="literal">git merge -s resolve</code> is implemented with.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id278645"></a>How git stores objects efficiently: pack files</h2></div></div></div><p>We've seen how git stores each object in a file named after the
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221175object's SHA1 hash.</p><p>Unfortunately this system becomes inefficient once a project has a
1176lot of objects. Try this on an old project:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git count-objects<br>
11776930 objects, 47620 kilobytes</p></div><p>The first number is the number of objects which are kept in
1178individual files. The second is the amount of space taken up by
1179those "loose" objects.</p><p>You can save space and make git faster by moving these loose objects in
1180to a "pack file", which stores a group of objects in an efficient
1181compressed format; the details of how pack files are formatted can be
1182found in <a href="technical/pack-format.txt" target="_top">technical/pack-format.txt</a>.</p><p>To put the loose objects into a pack, just run git repack:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git repack<br>
1183Generating pack...<br>
1184Done counting 6020 objects.<br>
1185Deltifying 6020 objects.<br>
1186 100% (6020/6020) done<br>
1187Writing 6020 objects.<br>
1188 100% (6020/6020) done<br>
1189Total 6020, written 6020 (delta 4070), reused 0 (delta 0)<br>
1190Pack pack-3e54ad29d5b2e05838c75df582c65257b8d08e1c created.</p></div><p>You can then run</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git prune</p></div><p>to remove any of the "loose" objects that are now contained in the
1191pack. This will also remove any unreferenced objects (which may be
1192created when, for example, you use "git reset" to remove a commit).
1193You can verify that the loose objects are gone by looking at the
1194.git/objects directory or by running</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git count-objects<br>
11950 objects, 0 kilobytes</p></div><p>Although the object files are gone, any commands that refer to those
1196objects will work exactly as they did before.</p><p>The <a href="git-gc.html" target="_top">git-gc(1)</a> command performs packing, pruning, and more for
1197you, so is normally the only high-level command you need.</p></div><div class="section" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="dangling-objects"></a>Dangling objects</h2></div></div></div><p>The <a href="git-fsck.html" target="_top">git-fsck(1)</a> command will sometimes complain about dangling
1198objects. They are not a problem.</p><p>The most common cause of dangling objects is that you've rebased a
1199branch, or you have pulled from somebody else who rebased a branch&#8212;see
1200<a href="#cleaning-up-history" title="Chapter 6. Rewriting history and maintaining patch series">Chapter 6, <i>Rewriting history and maintaining patch series</i></a>. In that case, the old head of the original
1201branch still exists, as does obviously everything it pointed to. The
1202branch pointer itself just doesn't, since you replaced it with another
1203one.</p><p>There are also other situations too that cause dangling objects. For
1204example, a "dangling blob" may arise because you did a "git add" of a
1205file, but then, before you actually committed it and made it part of the
1206bigger picture, you changed something else in that file and committed
1207that <span class="strong"><strong>updated</strong></span> thing - the old state that you added originally ends up
1208not being pointed to by any commit or tree, so it's now a dangling blob
1209object.</p><p>Similarly, when the "recursive" merge strategy runs, and finds that
1210there are criss-cross merges and thus more than one merge base (which is
1211fairly unusual, but it does happen), it will generate one temporary
1212midway tree (or possibly even more, if you had lots of criss-crossing
1213merges and more than two merge bases) as a temporary internal merge
1214base, and again, those are real objects, but the end result will not end
1215up pointing to them, so they end up "dangling" in your repository.</p><p>Generally, dangling objects aren't anything to worry about. They can
1216even be very useful: if you screw something up, the dangling objects can
1217be how you recover your old tree (say, you did a rebase, and realized
1218that you really didn't want to - you can look at what dangling objects
1219you have, and decide to reset your head to some old dangling state).</p><p>For commits, the most useful thing to do with dangling objects tends to
1220be to do a simple</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ gitk &lt;dangling-commit-sha-goes-here&gt; --not --all</p></div><p>For blobs and trees, you can't do the same, but you can examine them.
1221You can just do</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git show &lt;dangling-blob/tree-sha-goes-here&gt;</p></div><p>to show what the contents of the blob were (or, for a tree, basically
1222what the "ls" for that directory was), and that may give you some idea
1223of what the operation was that left that dangling object.</p><p>Usually, dangling blobs and trees aren't very interesting. They're
1224almost always the result of either being a half-way mergebase (the blob
1225will often even have the conflict markers from a merge in it, if you
1226have had conflicting merges that you fixed up by hand), or simply
1227because you interrupted a "git fetch" with ^C or something like that,
1228leaving _some_ of the new objects in the object database, but just
1229dangling and useless.</p><p>Anyway, once you are sure that you're not interested in any dangling
1230state, you can just prune all unreachable objects:</p><div class="literallayout"><p>$ git prune</p></div><p>and they'll be gone. But you should only run "git prune" on a quiescent
1231repository - it's kind of like doing a filesystem fsck recovery: you
1232don't want to do that while the filesystem is mounted.</p><p>(The same is true of "git-fsck" itself, btw - but since
1233git-fsck never actually <span class="strong"><strong>changes</strong></span> the repository, it just reports
1234on what it found, git-fsck itself is never "dangerous" to run.
1235Running it while somebody is actually changing the repository can cause
1236confusing and scary messages, but it won't actually do anything bad. In
1237contrast, running "git prune" while somebody is actively changing the
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411238repository is a <span class="strong"><strong>BAD</strong></span> idea).</p></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id278905"></a>Chapter 9. GIT Glossary</h2></div></div></div><div class="variablelist"><dl><dt><span class="term">
1239<a name="def_alternate_object_database"></a>alternate object database
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221240</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411241 Via the alternates mechanism, a <a href="#def_repository">repository</a> can
1242 inherit part of its <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a> from another
1243 <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a>, which is called "alternate".
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221244</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411245<a name="def_bare_repository"></a>bare repository
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221246</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411247 A <a href="#def_bare_repository">bare repository</a> is normally an appropriately
1248 named <a href="#def_directory">directory</a> with a <code class="literal">.git</code> suffix that does not
1249 have a locally checked-out copy of any of the files under
1250 <a href="#def_revision">revision</a> control. That is, all of the <code class="literal">git</code>
1251 administrative and control files that would normally be present in the
1252 hidden <code class="literal">.git</code> sub-directory are directly present in the
1253 <code class="literal">repository.git</code> directory instead,
1254 and no other files are present and checked out. Usually publishers of
1255 public repositories make bare repositories available.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221256</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411257<a name="def_blob_object"></a>blob object
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221258</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411259 Untyped <a href="#def_object">object</a>, e.g. the contents of a file.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221260</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411261<a name="def_branch"></a>branch
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221262</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411263 A non-cyclical graph of revisions, i.e. the complete history of a
1264 particular <a href="#def_revision">revision</a>, which is called the
1265 branch <a href="#def_head">head</a>. The heads
1266 are stored in <code class="literal">$GIT_DIR/refs/heads/</code>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221267</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411268<a name="def_cache"></a>cache
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221269</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411270 Obsolete for: <a href="#def_index">index</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221271</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411272<a name="def_chain"></a>chain
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221273</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411274 A list of objects, where each <a href="#def_object">object</a> in the list contains
1275 a reference to its successor (for example, the successor of a
1276 <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> could be one of its parents).
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221277</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411278<a name="def_changeset"></a>changeset
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221279</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411280 BitKeeper/cvsps speak for "<a href="#def_commit">commit</a>". Since git does not
1281 store changes, but states, it really does not make sense to use the term
1282 "changesets" with git.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221283</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411284<a name="def_checkout"></a>checkout
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221285</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411286 The action of updating the <a href="#def_working_tree">working tree</a> to a
1287 <a href="#def_revision">revision</a> which was stored in the
1288 <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221289</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411290<a name="def_cherry-picking"></a>cherry-picking
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221291</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411292 In <a href="#def_SCM">SCM</a> jargon, "cherry pick" means to choose a subset of
1293 changes out of a series of changes (typically commits) and record them
1294 as a new series of changes on top of different codebase. In GIT, this is
1295 performed by "git cherry-pick" command to extract the change introduced
1296 by an existing <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> and to record it based on the tip
1297 of the current <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> as a new <a href="#def_commit">commit</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221298</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411299<a name="def_clean"></a>clean
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221300</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411301 A <a href="#def_working_tree">working tree</a> is <a href="#def_clean">clean</a>, if it
1302 corresponds to the <a href="#def_revision">revision</a> referenced by the current
1303 <a href="#def_head">head</a>. Also see "<a href="#def_dirty">dirty</a>".
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221304</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411305<a name="def_commit"></a>commit
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221306</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411307 As a verb: The action of storing the current state of the
1308 <a href="#def_index">index</a> in the <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a>. The
1309 result is a <a href="#def_revision">revision</a>. As a noun: Short hand for
1310 <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221311</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411312<a name="def_commit_object"></a>commit object
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221313</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411314 An <a href="#def_object">object</a> which contains the information about a
1315 particular <a href="#def_revision">revision</a>, such as parents, committer,
1316 author, date and the <a href="#def_tree_object">tree object</a> which corresponds
1317 to the top <a href="#def_directory">directory</a> of the stored
1318 <a href="#def_revision">revision</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221319</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411320<a name="def_core_git"></a>core git
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221321</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411322 Fundamental data structures and utilities of git. Exposes only limited
1323 source code management tools.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221324</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411325<a name="def_DAG"></a>DAG
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221326</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411327 Directed acyclic graph. The <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> objects form a
1328 directed acyclic graph, because they have parents (directed), and the
1329 graph of <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> objects is acyclic (there is no
1330 <a href="#def_chain">chain</a> which begins and ends with the same
1331 <a href="#def_object">object</a>).
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221332</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411333<a name="def_dangling_object"></a>dangling object
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:291334</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411335 An <a href="#def_unreachable_object">unreachable object</a> which is not
1336 <a href="#def_reachable">reachable</a> even from other unreachable objects; a
1337 <a href="#def_dangling_object">dangling object</a> has no references to it from any
1338 reference or <a href="#def_object">object</a> in the <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>.
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:291339</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411340<a name="def_dircache"></a>dircache
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221341</span></dt><dd>
1342 You are <span class="strong"><strong>waaaaay</strong></span> behind.
1343</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411344<a name="def_directory"></a>directory
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221345</span></dt><dd>
1346 The list you get with "ls" :-)
1347</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411348<a name="def_dirty"></a>dirty
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221349</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411350 A <a href="#def_working_tree">working tree</a> is said to be <a href="#def_dirty">dirty</a> if
1351 it contains modifications which have not been committed to the current
1352 <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>.
1353</dd><dt><span class="term">
1354<a name="def_ent"></a>ent
1355</span></dt><dd>
1356 Favorite synonym to "<a href="#def_tree-ish">tree-ish</a>" by some total geeks. See
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221357 <code class="literal">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ent_(Middle-earth)</code> for an in-depth
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411358 explanation. Avoid this term, not to confuse people.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221359</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411360<a name="def_fast_forward"></a>fast forward
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221361</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411362 A fast-forward is a special type of <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> where you have a
1363 <a href="#def_revision">revision</a> and you are "merging" another
1364 <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>'s changes that happen to be a descendant of what
1365 you have. In such these cases, you do not make a new <a href="#def_merge">merge</a>
1366 <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> but instead just update to his
1367 <a href="#def_revision">revision</a>. This will happen frequently on a
1368 <a href="#def_tracking_branch">tracking branch</a> of a remote
1369 <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221370</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411371<a name="def_fetch"></a>fetch
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221372</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411373 Fetching a <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> means to get the
1374 <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>'s <a href="#def_head_ref">head ref</a> from a remote
1375 <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>, to find out which objects are missing
1376 from the local <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a>, and to get them,
1377 too.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221378</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411379<a name="def_file_system"></a>file system
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221380</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411381 Linus Torvalds originally designed git to be a user space file system,
1382 i.e. the infrastructure to hold files and directories. That ensured the
1383 efficiency and speed of git.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221384</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411385<a name="def_git_archive"></a>git archive
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221386</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411387 Synonym for <a href="#def_repository">repository</a> (for arch people).
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221388</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411389<a name="def_grafts"></a>grafts
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221390</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411391 Grafts enables two otherwise different lines of development to be joined
1392 together by recording fake ancestry information for commits. This way
1393 you can make git pretend the set of parents a <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> has
1394 is different from what was recorded when the <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> was
1395 created. Configured via the <code class="literal">.git/info/grafts</code> file.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221396</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411397<a name="def_hash"></a>hash
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221398</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411399 In git's context, synonym to <a href="#def_object_name">object name</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221400</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411401<a name="def_head"></a>head
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221402</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411403 The top of a <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>. It contains a <a href="#def_ref">ref</a> to the
1404 corresponding <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221405</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411406<a name="def_head_ref"></a>head ref
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221407</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411408 A <a href="#def_ref">ref</a> pointing to a <a href="#def_head">head</a>. Often, this is
1409 abbreviated to "<a href="#def_head">head</a>". Head refs are stored in
1410 <code class="literal">$GIT_DIR/refs/heads/</code>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221411</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411412<a name="def_hook"></a>hook
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221413</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411414 During the normal execution of several git commands, call-outs are made
1415 to optional scripts that allow a developer to add functionality or
1416 checking. Typically, the hooks allow for a command to be pre-verified
1417 and potentially aborted, and allow for a post-notification after the
1418 operation is done. The <a href="#def_hook">hook</a> scripts are found in the
1419 <code class="literal">$GIT_DIR/hooks/</code> <a href="#def_directory">directory</a>, and are enabled by simply
1420 making them executable.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221421</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411422<a name="def_index"></a>index
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221423</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411424 A collection of files with stat information, whose contents are stored
1425 as objects. The <a href="#def_index">index</a> is a stored version of your working
1426 <a href="#def_tree">tree</a>. Truth be told, it can also contain a second, and even
1427 a third version of a <a href="#def_working_tree">working tree</a>, which are used
1428 when merging.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221429</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411430<a name="def_index_entry"></a>index entry
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221431</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411432 The information regarding a particular file, stored in the
1433 <a href="#def_index">index</a>. An <a href="#def_index_entry">index entry</a> can be unmerged,
1434 if a <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> was started, but not yet finished (i.e. if the
1435 <a href="#def_index">index</a> contains multiple versions of that file).
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221436</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411437<a name="def_master"></a>master
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221438</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411439 The default development <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>. Whenever you create a git
1440 <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>, a <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> named
1441 "<a href="#def_master">master</a>" is created, and becomes the active
1442 <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>. In most cases, this contains the local
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221443 development, though that is purely conventional and not required.
1444</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411445<a name="def_merge"></a>merge
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221446</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411447 To <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> branches means to try to accumulate the changes
1448 since a common ancestor and apply them to the first
1449 <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>. An automatic <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> uses heuristics
1450 to accomplish that. Evidently, an automatic <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> can
1451 fail.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221452</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411453<a name="def_object"></a>object
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221454</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411455 The unit of storage in git. It is uniquely identified by the
1456 <a href="#def_SHA1">SHA1</a> of its contents. Consequently, an
1457 <a href="#def_object">object</a> can not be changed.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221458</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411459<a name="def_object_database"></a>object database
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221460</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411461 Stores a set of "objects", and an individual <a href="#def_object">object</a> is
1462 identified by its <a href="#def_object_name">object name</a>. The objects usually
1463 live in <code class="literal">$GIT_DIR/objects/</code>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221464</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411465<a name="def_object_identifier"></a>object identifier
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221466</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411467 Synonym for <a href="#def_object_name">object name</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221468</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411469<a name="def_object_name"></a>object name
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221470</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411471 The unique identifier of an <a href="#def_object">object</a>. The <a href="#def_hash">hash</a>
1472 of the <a href="#def_object">object</a>'s contents using the Secure Hash Algorithm
1473 1 and usually represented by the 40 character hexadecimal encoding of
1474 the <a href="#def_hash">hash</a> of the <a href="#def_object">object</a> (possibly followed by
1475 a white space).
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221476</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411477<a name="def_object_type"></a>object type
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221478</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411479 One of the identifiers
1480 "<a href="#def_commit">commit</a>","<a href="#def_tree">tree</a>","<a href="#def_tag">tag</a>" or "<a href="#def_blob_object">blob</a>"
1481 describing the type of an <a href="#def_object">object</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221482</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411483<a name="def_octopus"></a>octopus
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221484</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411485 To <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> more than two branches. Also denotes an
1486 intelligent predator.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221487</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411488<a name="def_origin"></a>origin
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221489</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411490 The default upstream <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>. Most projects have
1491 at least one upstream project which they track. By default
1492 <span class="emphasis"><em><a href="#def_origin">origin</a></em></span> is used for that purpose. New upstream updates
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221493 will be fetched into remote tracking branches named
1494 origin/name-of-upstream-branch, which you can see using
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411495 "git <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> -r".
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221496</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411497<a name="def_pack"></a>pack
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221498</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411499 A set of objects which have been compressed into one file (to save space
1500 or to transmit them efficiently).
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221501</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411502<a name="def_pack_index"></a>pack index
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221503</span></dt><dd>
1504 The list of identifiers, and other information, of the objects in a
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411505 <a href="#def_pack">pack</a>, to assist in efficiently accessing the contents of a
1506 <a href="#def_pack">pack</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221507</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411508<a name="def_parent"></a>parent
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221509</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411510 A <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a> contains a (possibly empty) list
1511 of the logical predecessor(s) in the line of development, i.e. its
1512 parents.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221513</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411514<a name="def_pickaxe"></a>pickaxe
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221515</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411516 The term <a href="#def_pickaxe">pickaxe</a> refers to an option to the diffcore
1517 routines that help select changes that add or delete a given text
1518 string. With the &#8212;pickaxe-all option, it can be used to view the full
1519 <a href="#def_changeset">changeset</a> that introduced or removed, say, a
1520 particular line of text. See <a href="git-diff.html" target="_top">git-diff(1)</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221521</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411522<a name="def_plumbing"></a>plumbing
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221523</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411524 Cute name for <a href="#def_core_git">core git</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221525</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411526<a name="def_porcelain"></a>porcelain
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221527</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411528 Cute name for programs and program suites depending on
1529 <a href="#def_core_git">core git</a>, presenting a high level access to
1530 <a href="#def_core_git">core git</a>. Porcelains expose more of a <a href="#def_SCM">SCM</a>
1531 interface than the <a href="#def_plumbing">plumbing</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221532</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411533<a name="def_pull"></a>pull
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221534</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411535 Pulling a <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> means to <a href="#def_fetch">fetch</a> it and
1536 <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> it.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221537</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411538<a name="def_push"></a>push
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221539</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411540 Pushing a <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> means to get the <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>'s
1541 <a href="#def_head_ref">head ref</a> from a remote <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>,
1542 find out if it is an ancestor to the <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>'s local
1543 <a href="#def_head_ref">head ref</a> is a direct, and in that case, putting all
1544 objects, which are <a href="#def_reachable">reachable</a> from the local
1545 <a href="#def_head_ref">head ref</a>, and which are missing from the remote
1546 <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>, into the remote
1547 <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a>, and updating the remote
1548 <a href="#def_head_ref">head ref</a>. If the remote <a href="#def_head">head</a> is not an
1549 ancestor to the local <a href="#def_head">head</a>, the <a href="#def_push">push</a> fails.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221550</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411551<a name="def_reachable"></a>reachable
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221552</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411553 All of the ancestors of a given <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> are said to be
1554 <a href="#def_reachable">reachable</a> from that <a href="#def_commit">commit</a>. More
1555 generally, one <a href="#def_object">object</a> is <a href="#def_reachable">reachable</a> from
1556 another if we can reach the one from the other by a <a href="#def_chain">chain</a>
1557 that follows <a href="#def_tag">tags</a> to whatever they tag,
1558 <a href="#def_commit_object">commits</a> to their parents or trees, and
1559 <a href="#def_tree_object">trees</a> to the trees or <a href="#def_blob_object">blobs</a>
1560 that they contain.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221561</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411562<a name="def_rebase"></a>rebase
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221563</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411564 To reapply a series of changes from a <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> to a
1565 different base, and reset the <a href="#def_head">head</a> of that branch
1566 to the result.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221567</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411568<a name="def_ref"></a>ref
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221569</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411570 A 40-byte hex representation of a <a href="#def_SHA1">SHA1</a> or a name that
1571 denotes a particular <a href="#def_object">object</a>. These may be stored in
1572 <code class="literal">$GIT_DIR/refs/</code>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221573</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411574<a name="def_refspec"></a>refspec
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221575</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411576 A <a href="#def_refspec">refspec</a> is used by <a href="#def_fetch">fetch</a> and
1577 <a href="#def_push">push</a> to describe the mapping between remote <a href="#def_ref">ref</a>
1578 and local <a href="#def_ref">ref</a>. They are combined with a colon in the format
1579 &lt;src&gt;:&lt;dst&gt;, preceded by an optional plus sign, +. For example: <code class="literal">git
1580 fetch $URL refs/heads/master:refs/heads/origin</code> means
1581 "grab the master <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> <a href="#def_head">head</a>
1582 from the $URL and store it as my origin
1583 <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> <a href="#def_head">head</a>". And <code class="literal">git <a href="#def_push">push</a>
1584 $URL refs/heads/master:refs/heads/to-upstream</code> means
1585 "publish my master <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>
1586 <a href="#def_head">head</a> as to-upstream <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> at $URL". See
1587 also <a href="git-push.html" target="_top">git-push(1)</a>
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221588</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411589<a name="def_repository"></a>repository
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221590</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411591 A collection of refs together with an <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a> containing all objects which are <a href="#def_reachable">reachable</a>
1592 from the refs, possibly accompanied by meta data from one or more
1593 porcelains. A <a href="#def_repository">repository</a> can share an
1594 <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a> with other repositories.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221595</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411596<a name="def_resolve"></a>resolve
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221597</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411598 The action of fixing up manually what a failed automatic
1599 <a href="#def_merge">merge</a> left behind.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221600</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411601<a name="def_revision"></a>revision
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221602</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411603 A particular state of files and directories which was stored in the
1604 <a href="#def_object_database">object database</a>. It is referenced by a
1605 <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221606</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411607<a name="def_rewind"></a>rewind
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221608</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411609 To throw away part of the development, i.e. to assign the
1610 <a href="#def_head">head</a> to an earlier <a href="#def_revision">revision</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221611</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411612<a name="def_SCM"></a>SCM
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221613</span></dt><dd>
1614 Source code management (tool).
1615</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411616<a name="def_SHA1"></a>SHA1
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221617</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411618 Synonym for <a href="#def_object_name">object name</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221619</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411620<a name="def_shallow_repository"></a>shallow repository
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221621</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411622 A <a href="#def_shallow_repository">shallow repository</a> has an incomplete
1623 history some of whose commits have parents cauterized away (in other
1624 words, git is told to pretend that these commits do not have the
1625 parents, even though they are recorded in the <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a>). This is sometimes useful when you are interested only in the
1626 recent history of a project even though the real history recorded in the
1627 upstream is much larger. A <a href="#def_shallow_repository">shallow repository</a>
1628 is created by giving the <code class="literal">&#8212;depth</code> option to <a href="git-clone.html" target="_top">git-clone(1)</a>, and
1629 its history can be later deepened with <a href="git-fetch.html" target="_top">git-fetch(1)</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221630</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411631<a name="def_symref"></a>symref
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221632</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411633 Symbolic reference: instead of containing the <a href="#def_SHA1">SHA1</a> id
1634 itself, it is of the format <span class="emphasis"><em>ref: refs/some/thing</em></span> and when
1635 referenced, it recursively dereferences to this reference. <span class="emphasis"><em>HEAD</em></span> is a
1636 prime example of a <a href="#def_symref">symref</a>. Symbolic references are
1637 manipulated with the <a href="git-symbolic-ref.html" target="_top">git-symbolic-ref(1)</a> command.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221638</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411639<a name="def_tag"></a>tag
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221640</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411641 A <a href="#def_ref">ref</a> pointing to a <a href="#def_tag">tag</a> or
1642 <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a>. In contrast to a <a href="#def_head">head</a>,
1643 a tag is not changed by a <a href="#def_commit">commit</a>. Tags (not
1644 <a href="#def_tag_object">tag objects</a>) are stored in <code class="literal">$GIT_DIR/refs/tags/</code>. A
1645 git tag has nothing to do with a Lisp tag (which would be
1646 called an <a href="#def_object_type">object type</a> in git's context). A
1647 tag is most typically used to mark a particular point in the
1648 <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> ancestry <a href="#def_chain">chain</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221649</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411650<a name="def_tag_object"></a>tag object
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221651</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411652 An <a href="#def_object">object</a> containing a <a href="#def_ref">ref</a> pointing to
1653 another <a href="#def_object">object</a>, which can contain a message just like a
1654 <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a>. It can also contain a (PGP)
1655 signature, in which case it is called a "signed <a href="#def_tag_object">tag object</a>".
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221656</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411657<a name="def_topic_branch"></a>topic branch
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221658</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411659 A regular git <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> that is used by a developer to
1660 identify a conceptual line of development. Since branches are very easy
1661 and inexpensive, it is often desirable to have several small branches
1662 that each contain very well defined concepts or small incremental yet
1663 related changes.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221664</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411665<a name="def_tracking_branch"></a>tracking branch
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221666</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411667 A regular git <a href="#def_branch">branch</a> that is used to follow changes from
1668 another <a href="#def_repository">repository</a>. A <a href="#def_tracking_branch">tracking branch</a> should not contain direct modifications or have local commits
1669 made to it. A <a href="#def_tracking_branch">tracking branch</a> can usually be
1670 identified as the right-hand-side <a href="#def_ref">ref</a> in a Pull:
1671 <a href="#def_refspec">refspec</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221672</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411673<a name="def_tree"></a>tree
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221674</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411675 Either a <a href="#def_working_tree">working tree</a>, or a <a href="#def_tree_object">tree object</a> together with the dependent blob and <a href="#def_tree">tree</a> objects
1676 (i.e. a stored representation of a <a href="#def_working_tree">working tree</a>).
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221677</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411678<a name="def_tree_object"></a>tree object
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221679</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411680 An <a href="#def_object">object</a> containing a list of file names and modes along
1681 with refs to the associated blob and/or tree objects. A
1682 <a href="#def_tree">tree</a> is equivalent to a <a href="#def_directory">directory</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221683</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411684<a name="def_tree-ish"></a>tree-ish
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221685</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411686 A <a href="#def_ref">ref</a> pointing to either a <a href="#def_commit_object">commit object</a>, a <a href="#def_tree_object">tree object</a>, or a <a href="#def_tag_object">tag object</a> pointing to a <a href="#def_tag">tag</a> or <a href="#def_commit">commit</a> or
1687 <a href="#def_tree_object">tree object</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221688</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411689<a name="def_unmerged_index"></a>unmerged index
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221690</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411691 An <a href="#def_index">index</a> which contains unmerged
1692 <a href="#def_index_entry">index entries</a>.
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221693</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411694<a name="def_unreachable_object"></a>unreachable object
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:291695</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411696 An <a href="#def_object">object</a> which is not <a href="#def_reachable">reachable</a> from a
1697 <a href="#def_branch">branch</a>, <a href="#def_tag">tag</a>, or any other reference.
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:291698</dd><dt><span class="term">
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411699<a name="def_working_tree"></a>working tree
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221700</span></dt><dd>
Junio C Hamano3d5b41f2007-03-26 02:33:411701 The set of files and directories currently being worked on, i.e. you can
1702 work in your <a href="#def_working_tree">working tree</a> without using git at all.
1703</dd></dl></div></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="id282187"></a>Chapter 10. Notes and todo list for this manual</h2></div></div></div><p>This is a work in progress.</p><p>The basic requirements:
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221704 - It must be readable in order, from beginning to end, by
1705 someone intelligent with a basic grasp of the unix
1706 commandline, but without any special knowledge of git. If
1707 necessary, any other prerequisites should be specifically
1708 mentioned as they arise.
1709 - Whenever possible, section headings should clearly describe
1710 the task they explain how to do, in language that requires
1711 no more knowledge than necessary: for example, "importing
1712 patches into a project" rather than "the git-am command"</p><p>Think about how to create a clear chapter dependency graph that will
1713allow people to get to important topics without necessarily reading
Junio C Hamano39381a72007-02-02 07:35:151714everything in between.</p><p>Say something about .gitignore.</p><p>Scan Documentation/ for other stuff left out; in particular:
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221715 howto's
1716 some of technical/?
1717 hooks
1718 list of commands in <a href="git.html" target="_top">git(1)</a></p><p>Scan email archives for other stuff left out</p><p>Scan man pages to see if any assume more background than this manual
1719provides.</p><p>Simplify beginning by suggesting disconnected head instead of
Junio C Hamanoaa83a7d2007-03-05 02:37:291720temporary branch creation?</p><p>Add more good examples. Entire sections of just cookbook examples
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221721might be a good idea; maybe make an "advanced examples" section a
1722standard end-of-chapter section?</p><p>Include cross-references to the glossary, where appropriate.</p><p>Document shallow clones? See draft 1.5.0 release notes for some
Junio C Hamanoee1e4282007-02-04 08:32:041723documentation.</p><p>Add a section on working with other version control systems, including
Junio C Hamano8f62db92007-02-01 00:22:221724CVS, Subversion, and just imports of series of release tarballs.</p><p>More details on gitweb?</p><p>Write a chapter on using plumbing and writing scripts.</p></div></div></body></html>