Professional Git

Chapter 13Understanding Remotes—Workflows for Changes

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Dealing with changes from multiple users
• Resolving conflicts after updating from a remote
• Rebasing versus merging after a pull
• Using the fork-and-pull model for collaboration and contribution
• Stashing, a better way to merge
• Tying all the workflow pieces together

So far in this book, I’ve focused mostly on working with Git as an individual user in a local environment. In Chapter 12, I extended this discussion to interacting with the remote environment. In this chapter, I’ll focus on working with other users.

I’ll first explore the basic conflict-merge resolution workflow that comes into play when someone else has changed code you’ve also been working on. I’ll show you how this workflow works and explain why the process happens the way it does. Next, I’ll present a modified workflow that is widely used for contributing to other users’ projects. Finally I’ll discuss a strategy to help mitigate surprises when you pull updates, and fit that strategy into a larger workflow that is similar to what you might use with some other source control systems.

NOTE

Workflows is a term that is often overused in technical documents. With Git, I previously talked about adding and committing content in the local environment. The workflows that I discuss in this chapter extend that model further—to interactions and strategies when pushing changes to the remote repository, and working in an environment where others ...