Branching: the power of git

Hello everybody,

Let's study a bit of how to branch with git.
This is probably one of the best features in git: the ability to create local branches and track them with upstream branch.

For instance, you can have how many branches you want. Let's say you're a maintainer of a driver, so you could use the following branches:

  • master (the upstream branch);
  • maintenance (used for maintenance tasks);
  • experimental (used for experimental work);

Ok. Now that's our scenario. Let's create those branches to see what happens:

$ git-branch maintenance
$ git-branch experimental

Now, if you run git-branch without any parameter, you will see both branches created:

$ git-branch
experimental
maintenance
* master

The "*" in master, tells you that you're now working on that branch, any changes will be committed to it.
If you mis-spelled a branch name you can rename it with git-branch -m oldbranch newbranch. Let's try it out:

$ git-branch -m experimental blabla
$ git-branch
blabla
maintenance
* master
$

It works just fine. Put back the name experimental and let's keep going.
We already how to create and rename a branch... But and if I wanna delete it? It's also really easy:

$ git-branch -d experimental
Deleted branch experimental.
$ git-branch
maintenance
* master
$

Recreate the branch experimental and let's prepare for other post. We're gonna learn how to start editing a branch, committing and merging.

See y'all

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