Version Control with Git

How Git Thinks About Merges

At first, Git’s automatic merging support seems nothing short of magical, especially compared to the more complicated and error-prone merging steps needed in other version control systems.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on behind the scenes to make it all possible.

Merges and Git’s Object Model

In most version control systems, each commit has only one parent. On such a system, when you merge some_branch into my_branch, you create a new commit on my_branch with the changes from some_branch. Conversely, if you merge my_branch into some_branch, this creates a new commit on some_branch containing the changes from my_branch. Merging branch A into branch B and merging branch B into branch A are two different operations.

However, Git designers noticed that each of these two operations results in the same set of files when you’re done. The natural way to express either operation is simply to say “Merge all the changes from some_branch and another_branch into a single branch.”

In Git, the merge yields in a new tree object with the merged files, but it also introduces a new commit object on only the target branch. After these commands:

$ git checkout my_branch
$ git merge some_branch

the object model looks like Figure 9-10.

Figure 9-10. Object model after a merge

In Figure 9-10, each Cx is a commit object and each Tx represents the corresponding tree ...