Git User's Manual _________________ This manual is designed to be readable by someone with basic unix commandline skills, but no previous knowledge of git. Chapter 1 gives a brief overview of git commands, without any explanation; you may prefer to skip to chapter 2 on a first reading. Chapters 2 and 3 explain how to fetch and study a project using git--the tools you'd need to build and test a particular version of a software project, to search for regressions, and so on. Chapter 4 explains how to do development with git, and chapter 5 how to share that development with others. Further chapters cover more specialized topics. Comprehensive reference documentation is available through the man pages. For a command such as "git clone", just use ------------------------------------------------ $ man git-clone ------------------------------------------------ Git Quick Start =============== This is a quick summary of the major commands; the following chapters will explain how these work in more detail. Creating a new repository ------------------------- From a tarball: ----------------------------------------------- $ tar xzf project.tar.gz $ cd project $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in .git/ $ git add . $ git commit ----------------------------------------------- From a remote repository: ----------------------------------------------- $ git clone git://example.com/pub/project.git $ cd project ----------------------------------------------- Managing branches ----------------- ----------------------------------------------- $ git branch # list all branches in this repo $ git checkout test # switch working directory to branch "test" $ git branch new # create branch "new" starting at current HEAD $ git branch -d new # delete branch "new" ----------------------------------------------- Instead of basing new branch on current HEAD (the default), use: ----------------------------------------------- $ git branch new test # branch named "test" $ git branch new v2.6.15 # tag named v2.6.15 $ git branch new HEAD^ # commit before the most recent $ git branch new HEAD^^ # commit before that $ git branch new test~10 # ten commits before tip of branch "test" ----------------------------------------------- Create and switch to a new branch at the same time: ----------------------------------------------- $ git checkout -b new v2.6.15 ----------------------------------------------- Update and examine branches from the repository you cloned from: ----------------------------------------------- $ git fetch # update $ git branch -r # list origin/master origin/next ... $ git branch checkout -b masterwork origin/master ----------------------------------------------- Fetch a branch from a different repository, and give it a new name in your repository: ----------------------------------------------- $ git fetch git://example.com/project.git theirbranch:mybranch $ git fetch git://example.com/project.git v2.6.15:mybranch ----------------------------------------------- Keep a list of repositories you work with regularly: ----------------------------------------------- $ git remote add example git://example.com/project.git $ git remote # list remote repositories example origin $ git remote show example # get details * remote example URL: git://example.com/project.git Tracked remote branches master next ... $ git fetch example # update branches from example $ git branch -r # list all remote branches ----------------------------------------------- Exploring history ----------------- ----------------------------------------------- $ gitk # visualize and browse history $ git log # list all commits $ git log src/ # ...modifying src/ $ git log v2.6.15..v2.6.16 # ...in v2.6.16, not in v2.6.15 $ git log master..test # ...in branch test, not in branch master $ git log test..master # ...in branch master, but not in test $ git log test...master # ...in one branch, not in both $ git log -S'foo()' # ...where difference contain "foo()" $ git log --since="2 weeks ago" $ git log -p # show patches as well $ git show # most recent commit $ git diff v2.6.15..v2.6.16 # diff between two tagged versions $ git diff v2.6.15..HEAD # diff with current head $ git grep "foo()" # search working directory for "foo()" $ git grep v2.6.15 "foo()" # search old tree for "foo()" $ git show v2.6.15:a.txt # look at old version of a.txt ----------------------------------------------- Search for regressions: ----------------------------------------------- $ git bisect start $ git bisect bad # current version is bad $ git bisect good v2.6.13-rc2 # last known good revision Bisecting: 675 revisions left to test after this # test here, then: $ git bisect good # if this revision is good, or $ git bisect bad # if this revision is bad. # repeat until done. ----------------------------------------------- Making changes -------------- Make sure git knows who to blame: ------------------------------------------------ $ cat >~/.gitconfig <<\EOF [user] name = Your Name Comes Here email = you@yourdomain.example.com EOF ------------------------------------------------ Select file contents to include in the next commit, then make the commit: ----------------------------------------------- $ git add a.txt # updated file $ git add b.txt # new file $ git rm c.txt # old file $ git commit ----------------------------------------------- Or, prepare and create the commit in one step: ----------------------------------------------- $ git commit d.txt # use latest content only of d.txt $ git commit -a # use latest content of all tracked files ----------------------------------------------- Merging ------- ----------------------------------------------- $ git merge test # merge branch "test" into the current branch $ git pull git://example.com/project.git master # fetch and merge in remote branch $ git pull . test # equivalent to git merge test ----------------------------------------------- Sharing your changes -------------------- Importing or exporting patches: ----------------------------------------------- $ git format-patch origin..HEAD # format a patch for each commit # in HEAD but not in origin $ git-am mbox # import patches from the mailbox "mbox" ----------------------------------------------- Fetch a branch in a different git repository, then merge into the current branch: ----------------------------------------------- $ git pull git://example.com/project.git theirbranch ----------------------------------------------- Store the fetched branch into a local branch before merging into the current branch: ----------------------------------------------- $ git pull git://example.com/project.git theirbranch:mybranch ----------------------------------------------- After creating commits on a local branch, update the remote branch with your commits: ----------------------------------------------- $ git push ssh://example.com/project.git mybranch:theirbranch ----------------------------------------------- When remote and local branch are both named "test": ----------------------------------------------- $ git push ssh://example.com/project.git test ----------------------------------------------- Shortcut version for a frequently used remote repository: ----------------------------------------------- $ git remote add example ssh://example.com/project.git $ git push example test ----------------------------------------------- Repository maintenance ---------------------- Check for corruption: ----------------------------------------------- $ git fsck ----------------------------------------------- Recompress, remove unused cruft: ----------------------------------------------- $ git gc ----------------------------------------------- Repositories and Branches ========================= How to get a git repository --------------------------- It will be useful to have a git repository to experiment with as you read this manual. The best way to get one is by using the gitlink:git-clone[1] command to download a copy of an existing repository for a project that you are interested in. If you don't already have a project in mind, here are some interesting examples: ------------------------------------------------ # git itself (approx. 10MB download): $ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git # the linux kernel (approx. 150MB download): $ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git ------------------------------------------------ The initial clone may be time-consuming for a large project, but you will only need to clone once. The clone command creates a new directory named after the project ("git" or "linux-2.6" in the examples above). After you cd into this directory, you will see that it contains a copy of the project files, together with a special top-level directory named ".git", which contains all the information about the history of the project. In most of the following, examples will be taken from one of the two repositories above. How to check out a different version of a project ------------------------------------------------- Git is best thought of as a tool for storing the history of a collection of files. It stores the history as a compressed collection of interrelated snapshots (versions) of the project's contents. A single git repository may contain multiple branches. Each branch is a bookmark referencing a particular point in the project history. The gitlink:git-branch[1] command shows you the list of branches: ------------------------------------------------ $ git branch * master ------------------------------------------------ A freshly cloned repository contains a single branch, named "master", and the working directory contains the version of the project referred to by the master branch. Most projects also use tags. Tags, like branches, are references into the project's history, and can be listed using the gitlink:git-tag[1] command: ------------------------------------------------ $ git tag -l v2.6.11 v2.6.11-tree v2.6.12 v2.6.12-rc2 v2.6.12-rc3 v2.6.12-rc4 v2.6.12-rc5 v2.6.12-rc6 v2.6.13 ... ------------------------------------------------ Tags are expected to always point at the same version of a project, while branches are expected to advance as development progresses. Create a new branch pointing to one of these versions and check it out using gitlink:git-checkout[1]: ------------------------------------------------ $ git checkout -b new v2.6.13 ------------------------------------------------ The working directory then reflects the contents that the project had when it was tagged v2.6.13, and gitlink:git-branch[1] shows two branches, with an asterisk marking the currently checked-out branch: ------------------------------------------------ $ git branch master * new ------------------------------------------------ If you decide that you'd rather see version 2.6.17, you can modify the current branch to point at v2.6.17 instead, with ------------------------------------------------ $ git reset --hard v2.6.17 ------------------------------------------------ Note that if the current branch was your only reference to a particular point in history, then resetting that branch may leave you with no way to find the history it used to point to; so use this command carefully. Understanding History: Commits ------------------------------ Every change in the history of a project is represented by a commit. The gitlink:git-show[1] command shows the most recent commit on the current branch: ------------------------------------------------ $ git show commit 2b5f6dcce5bf94b9b119e9ed8d537098ec61c3d2 Author: Jamal Hadi Salim Date: Sat Dec 2 22:22:25 2006 -0800 [XFRM]: Fix aevent structuring to be more complete. aevents can not uniquely identify an SA. We break the ABI with this patch, but consensus is that since it is not yet utilized by any (known) application then it is fine (better do it now than later). Signed-off-by: Jamal Hadi Salim Signed-off-by: David S. Miller diff --git a/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt b/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt index 8be626f..d7aac9d 100644 --- a/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt +++ b/Documentation/networking/xfrm_sync.txt @@ -47,10 +47,13 @@ aevent_id structure looks like: struct xfrm_aevent_id { struct xfrm_usersa_id sa_id; + xfrm_address_t saddr; __u32 flags; + __u32 reqid; }; ... ------------------------------------------------ As you can see, a commit shows who made the latest change, what they did, and why. Every commit has a 40-hexdigit id, sometimes called the "object name" or the "SHA1 id", shown on the first line of the "git show" output. You can usually refer to a commit by a shorter name, such as a tag or a branch name, but this longer name can also be useful. Most importantly, it is a globally unique name for this commit: so if you tell somebody else the object name (for example in email), then you are guaranteed that name will refer to the same commit in their repository that it does in yours (assuming their repository has that commit at all). Understanding history: commits, parents, and reachability ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Every commit (except the very first commit in a project) also has a parent commit which shows what happened before this commit. Following the chain of parents will eventually take you back to the beginning of the project. However, the commits do not form a simple list; git allows lines of development to diverge and then reconverge, and the point where two lines of development reconverge is called a "merge". The commit representing a merge can therefore have more than one parent, with each parent representing the most recent commit on one of the lines of development leading to that point. The best way to see how this works is using the gitlink:gitk[1] command; running gitk now on a git repository and looking for merge commits will help understand how the git organizes history. In the following, we say that commit X is "reachable" from commit Y if commit X is an ancestor of commit Y. Equivalently, you could say that Y is a descendent of X, or that there is a chain of parents leading from commit Y to commit X. Undestanding history: History diagrams ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We will sometimes represent git history using diagrams like the one below. Commits are shown as "o", and the links between them with lines drawn with - / and \. Time goes left to right: o--o--o <-- Branch A / o--o--o <-- master \ o--o--o <-- Branch B If we need to talk about a particular commit, the character "o" may be replaced with another letter or number. Understanding history: What is a branch? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Though we've been using the word "branch" to mean a kind of reference to a particular commit, the word branch is also commonly used to refer to the line of commits leading up to that point. In the example above, git may think of the branch named "A" as just a pointer to one particular commit, but we may refer informally to the line of three commits leading up to that point as all being part of "branch A". If we need to make it clear that we're just talking about the most recent commit on the branch, we may refer to that commit as the "head" of the branch. Manipulating branches --------------------- Creating, deleting, and modifying branches is quick and easy; here's a summary of the commands: git branch:: list all branches git branch :: create a new branch named , referencing the same point in history as the current branch git branch :: create a new branch named , referencing , which may be specified any way you like, including using a branch name or a tag name git branch -d :: delete the branch ; if the branch you are deleting points to a commit which is not reachable from this branch, this command will fail with a warning. git branch -D :: even if the branch points to a commit not reachable from the current branch, you may know that that commit is still reachable from some other branch or tag. In that case it is safe to use this command to force git to delete the branch. git checkout :: make the current branch , updating the working directory to reflect the version referenced by git checkout -b :: create a new branch referencing , and check it out. It is also useful to know that the special symbol "HEAD" can always be used to refer to the current branch. Examining branches from a remote repository ------------------------------------------- The "master" branch that was created at the time you cloned is a copy of the HEAD in the repository that you cloned from. That repository may also have had other branches, though, and your local repository keeps branches which track each of those remote branches, which you can view using the "-r" option to gitlink:git-branch[1]: ------------------------------------------------ $ git branch -r origin/HEAD origin/html origin/maint origin/man origin/master origin/next origin/pu origin/todo ------------------------------------------------ You cannot check out these remote-tracking branches, but you can examine them on a branch of your own, just as you would a tag: ------------------------------------------------ $ git checkout -b my-todo-copy origin/todo ------------------------------------------------ Note that the name "origin" is just the name that git uses by default to refer to the repository that you cloned from. [[how-git-stores-references]] Naming branches, tags, and other references ------------------------------------------- Branches, remote-tracking branches, and tags are all references to commits. All references are named with a slash-separated path name starting with "refs"; the names we've been using so far are actually shorthand: - The branch "test" is short for "refs/heads/test". - The tag "v2.6.18" is short for "refs/tags/v2.6.18". - "origin/master" is short for "refs/remotes/origin/master". The full name is occasionally useful if, for example, there ever exists a tag and a branch with the same name. As another useful shortcut, if the repository "origin" posesses only a single branch, you can refer to that branch as just "origin". More generally, if you have defined a remote repository named "example", you can refer to the branch in that repository as "example". And for a repository with multiple branches, this will refer to the branch designated as the "HEAD" branch. For the complete list of paths which git checks for references, and the order it uses to decide which to choose when there are multiple references with the same shorthand name, see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section of gitlink:git-rev-parse[1]. [[Updating-a-repository-with-git-fetch]] Updating a repository with git fetch ------------------------------------ Eventually the developer cloned from will do additional work in her repository, creating new commits and advancing the branches to point at the new commits. The command "git fetch", with no arguments, will update all of the remote-tracking branches to the latest version found in her repository. It will not touch any of your own branches--not even the "master" branch that was created for you on clone. Fetching branches from other repositories ----------------------------------------- You can also track branches from repositories other than the one you cloned from, using gitlink:git-remote[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git remote add linux-nfs git://linux-nfs.org/pub/nfs-2.6.git $ git fetch * refs/remotes/linux-nfs/master: storing branch 'master' ... commit: bf81b46 ------------------------------------------------- New remote-tracking branches will be stored under the shorthand name that you gave "git remote add", in this case linux-nfs: ------------------------------------------------- $ git branch -r linux-nfs/master origin/master ------------------------------------------------- If you run "git fetch " later, the tracking branches for the named will be updated. If you examine the file .git/config, you will see that git has added a new stanza: ------------------------------------------------- $ cat .git/config ... [remote "linux-nfs"] url = git://linux-nfs.org/~bfields/git.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/linux-nfs-read/* ... ------------------------------------------------- This is what causes git to track the remote's branches; you may modify or delete these configuration options by editing .git/config with a text editor. (See the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of gitlink:git-config[1] for details.) Exploring git history ===================== Git is best thought of as a tool for storing the history of a collection of files. It does this by storing compressed snapshots of the contents of a file heirarchy, together with "commits" which show the relationships between these snapshots. Git provides extremely flexible and fast tools for exploring the history of a project. We start with one specialized tool that is useful for finding the commit that introduced a bug into a project. How to use bisect to find a regression -------------------------------------- Suppose version 2.6.18 of your project worked, but the version at "master" crashes. Sometimes the best way to find the cause of such a regression is to perform a brute-force search through the project's history to find the particular commit that caused the problem. The gitlink:git-bisect[1] command can help you do this: ------------------------------------------------- $ git bisect start $ git bisect good v2.6.18 $ git bisect bad master Bisecting: 3537 revisions left to test after this [65934a9a028b88e83e2b0f8b36618fe503349f8e] BLOCK: Make USB storage depend on SCSI rather than selecting it [try #6] ------------------------------------------------- If you run "git branch" at this point, you'll see that git has temporarily moved you to a new branch named "bisect". This branch points to a commit (with commit id 65934...) that is reachable from v2.6.19 but not from v2.6.18. Compile and test it, and see whether it crashes. Assume it does crash. Then: ------------------------------------------------- $ git bisect bad Bisecting: 1769 revisions left to test after this [7eff82c8b1511017ae605f0c99ac275a7e21b867] i2c-core: Drop useless bitmaskings ------------------------------------------------- checks out an older version. Continue like this, telling git at each stage whether the version it gives you is good or bad, and notice that the number of revisions left to test is cut approximately in half each time. After about 13 tests (in this case), it will output the commit id of the guilty commit. You can then examine the commit with gitlink:git-show[1], find out who wrote it, and mail them your bug report with the commit id. Finally, run ------------------------------------------------- $ git bisect reset ------------------------------------------------- to return you to the branch you were on before and delete the temporary "bisect" branch. Note that the version which git-bisect checks out for you at each point is just a suggestion, and you're free to try a different version if you think it would be a good idea. For example, occasionally you may land on a commit that broke something unrelated; run ------------------------------------------------- $ git bisect-visualize ------------------------------------------------- which will run gitk and label the commit it chose with a marker that says "bisect". Chose a safe-looking commit nearby, note its commit id, and check it out with: ------------------------------------------------- $ git reset --hard fb47ddb2db... ------------------------------------------------- then test, run "bisect good" or "bisect bad" as appropriate, and continue. Naming commits -------------- We have seen several ways of naming commits already: - 40-hexdigit object name - branch name: refers to the commit at the head of the given branch - tag name: refers to the commit pointed to by the given tag (we've seen branches and tags are special cases of <>). - HEAD: refers to the head of the current branch There are many more; see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section of the gitlink:git-rev-parse[1] man page for the complete list of ways to name revisions. Some examples: ------------------------------------------------- $ git show fb47ddb2 # the first few characters of the object name # are usually enough to specify it uniquely $ git show HEAD^ # the parent of the HEAD commit $ git show HEAD^^ # the grandparent $ git show HEAD~4 # the great-great-grandparent ------------------------------------------------- Recall that merge commits may have more than one parent; by default, ^ and ~ follow the first parent listed in the commit, but you can also choose: ------------------------------------------------- $ git show HEAD^1 # show the first parent of HEAD $ git show HEAD^2 # show the second parent of HEAD ------------------------------------------------- In addition to HEAD, there are several other special names for commits: Merges (to be discussed later), as well as operations such as git-reset, which change the currently checked-out commit, generally set ORIG_HEAD to the value HEAD had before the current operation. The git-fetch operation always stores the head of the last fetched branch in FETCH_HEAD. For example, if you run git fetch without specifying a local branch as the target of the operation ------------------------------------------------- $ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git theirbranch ------------------------------------------------- the fetched commits will still be available from FETCH_HEAD. When we discuss merges we'll also see the special name MERGE_HEAD, which refers to the other branch that we're merging in to the current branch. The gitlink:git-rev-parse[1] command is a low-level command that is occasionally useful for translating some name for a commit to the object name for that commit: ------------------------------------------------- $ git rev-parse origin e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b ------------------------------------------------- Creating tags ------------- We can also create a tag to refer to a particular commit; after running ------------------------------------------------- $ git-tag stable-1 1b2e1d63ff ------------------------------------------------- You can use stable-1 to refer to the commit 1b2e1d63ff. This creates a "lightweight" tag. If the tag is a tag you wish to share with others, and possibly sign cryptographically, then you should create a tag object instead; see the gitlink:git-tag[1] man page for details. Browsing revisions ------------------ The gitlink:git-log[1] command can show lists of commits. On its own, it shows all commits reachable from the parent commit; but you can also make more specific requests: ------------------------------------------------- $ git log v2.5.. # commits since (not reachable from) v2.5 $ git log test..master # commits reachable from master but not test $ git log master..test # ...reachable from test but not master $ git log master...test # ...reachable from either test or master, # but not both $ git log --since="2 weeks ago" # commits from the last 2 weeks $ git log Makefile # commits which modify Makefile $ git log fs/ # ... which modify any file under fs/ $ git log -S'foo()' # commits which add or remove any file data # matching the string 'foo()' ------------------------------------------------- And of course you can combine all of these; the following finds commits since v2.5 which touch the Makefile or any file under fs: ------------------------------------------------- $ git log v2.5.. Makefile fs/ ------------------------------------------------- You can also ask git log to show patches: ------------------------------------------------- $ git log -p ------------------------------------------------- See the "--pretty" option in the gitlink:git-log[1] man page for more display options. Note that git log starts with the most recent commit and works backwards through the parents; however, since git history can contain multiple independant lines of development, the particular order that commits are listed in may be somewhat arbitrary. Generating diffs ---------------- You can generate diffs between any two versions using gitlink:git-diff[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git diff master..test ------------------------------------------------- Sometimes what you want instead is a set of patches: ------------------------------------------------- $ git format-patch master..test ------------------------------------------------- will generate a file with a patch for each commit reachable from test but not from master. Note that if master also has commits which are not reachable from test, then the combined result of these patches will not be the same as the diff produced by the git-diff example. Viewing old file versions ------------------------- You can always view an old version of a file by just checking out the correct revision first. But sometimes it is more convenient to be able to view an old version of a single file without checking anything out; this command does that: ------------------------------------------------- $ git show v2.5:fs/locks.c ------------------------------------------------- Before the colon may be anything that names a commit, and after it may be any path to a file tracked by git. Examples -------- Check whether two branches point at the same history ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Suppose you want to check whether two branches point at the same point in history. ------------------------------------------------- $ git diff origin..master ------------------------------------------------- will tell you whether the contents of the project are the same at the two branches; in theory, however, it's possible that the same project contents could have been arrived at by two different historical routes. You could compare the object names: ------------------------------------------------- $ git rev-list origin e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b $ git rev-list master e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b ------------------------------------------------- Or you could recall that the ... operator selects all commits contained reachable from either one reference or the other but not both: so ------------------------------------------------- $ git log origin...master ------------------------------------------------- will return no commits when the two branches are equal. Find first tagged version including a given fix ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Suppose you know that the commit e05db0fd fixed a certain problem. You'd like to find the earliest tagged release that contains that fix. Of course, there may be more than one answer--if the history branched after commit e05db0fd, then there could be multiple "earliest" tagged releases. You could just visually inspect the commits since e05db0fd: ------------------------------------------------- $ gitk e05db0fd.. ------------------------------------------------- Or you can use gitlink:git-name-rev[1], which will give the commit a name based on any tag it finds pointing to one of the commit's descendants: ------------------------------------------------- $ git name-rev e05db0fd e05db0fd tags/v1.5.0-rc1^0~23 ------------------------------------------------- The gitlink:git-describe[1] command does the opposite, naming the revision using a tag on which the given commit is based: ------------------------------------------------- $ git describe e05db0fd v1.5.0-rc0-ge05db0f ------------------------------------------------- but that may sometimes help you guess which tags might come after the given commit. If you just want to verify whether a given tagged version contains a given commit, you could use gitlink:git-merge-base[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git merge-base e05db0fd v1.5.0-rc1 e05db0fd4f31dde7005f075a84f96b360d05984b ------------------------------------------------- The merge-base command finds a common ancestor of the given commits, and always returns one or the other in the case where one is a descendant of the other; so the above output shows that e05db0fd actually is an ancestor of v1.5.0-rc1. Alternatively, note that ------------------------------------------------- $ git log v1.5.0-rc1..e05db0fd ------------------------------------------------- will produce empty output if and only if v1.5.0-rc1 includes e05db0fd, because it outputs only commits that are not reachable from v1.5.0-rc1. As yet another alternative, the gitlink:git-show-branch[1] command lists the commits reachable from its arguments with a display on the left-hand side that indicates which arguments that commit is reachable from. So, you can run something like ------------------------------------------------- $ git show-branch e05db0fd v1.5.0-rc0 v1.5.0-rc1 v1.5.0-rc2 ! [e05db0fd] Fix warnings in sha1_file.c - use C99 printf format if available ! [v1.5.0-rc0] GIT v1.5.0 preview ! [v1.5.0-rc1] GIT v1.5.0-rc1 ! [v1.5.0-rc2] GIT v1.5.0-rc2 ... ------------------------------------------------- then search for a line that looks like ------------------------------------------------- + ++ [e05db0fd] Fix warnings in sha1_file.c - use C99 printf format if available ------------------------------------------------- Which shows that e05db0fd is reachable from itself, from v1.5.0-rc1, and from v1.5.0-rc2, but not from v1.5.0-rc0. Developing with git =================== Telling git your name --------------------- Before creating any commits, you should introduce yourself to git. The easiest way to do so is: ------------------------------------------------ $ cat >~/.gitconfig <<\EOF [user] name = Your Name Comes Here email = you@yourdomain.example.com EOF ------------------------------------------------ (See the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of gitlink:git-config[1] for details on the configuration file.) Creating a new repository ------------------------- Creating a new repository from scratch is very easy: ------------------------------------------------- $ mkdir project $ cd project $ git init ------------------------------------------------- If you have some initial content (say, a tarball): ------------------------------------------------- $ tar -xzvf project.tar.gz $ cd project $ git init $ git add . # include everything below ./ in the first commit: $ git commit ------------------------------------------------- [[how-to-make-a-commit]] how to make a commit -------------------- Creating a new commit takes three steps: 1. Making some changes to the working directory using your favorite editor. 2. Telling git about your changes. 3. Creating the commit using the content you told git about in step 2. In practice, you can interleave and repeat steps 1 and 2 as many times as you want: in order to keep track of what you want committed at step 3, git maintains a snapshot of the tree's contents in a special staging area called "the index." At the beginning, the content of the index will be identical to that of the HEAD. The command "git diff --cached", which shows the difference between the HEAD and the index, should therefore produce no output at that point. Modifying the index is easy: To update the index with the new contents of a modified file, use ------------------------------------------------- $ git add path/to/file ------------------------------------------------- To add the contents of a new file to the index, use ------------------------------------------------- $ git add path/to/file ------------------------------------------------- To remove a file from the index and from the working tree, ------------------------------------------------- $ git rm path/to/file ------------------------------------------------- After each step you can verify that ------------------------------------------------- $ git diff --cached ------------------------------------------------- always shows the difference between the HEAD and the index file--this is what you'd commit if you created the commit now--and that ------------------------------------------------- $ git diff ------------------------------------------------- shows the difference between the working tree and the index file. Note that "git add" always adds just the current contents of a file to the index; further changes to the same file will be ignored unless you run git-add on the file again. When you're ready, just run ------------------------------------------------- $ git commit ------------------------------------------------- and git will prompt you for a commit message and then create the new commmit. Check to make sure it looks like what you expected with ------------------------------------------------- $ git show ------------------------------------------------- As a special shortcut, ------------------------------------------------- $ git commit -a ------------------------------------------------- will update the index with any files that you've modified or removed and create a commit, all in one step. A number of commands are useful for keeping track of what you're about to commit: ------------------------------------------------- $ git diff --cached # difference between HEAD and the index; what # would be commited if you ran "commit" now. $ git diff # difference between the index file and your # working directory; changes that would not # be included if you ran "commit" now. $ git status # a brief per-file summary of the above. ------------------------------------------------- creating good commit messages ----------------------------- Though not required, it's a good idea to begin the commit message with a single short (less than 50 character) line summarizing the change, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough description. Tools that turn commits into email, for example, use the first line on the Subject line and the rest of the commit in the body. how to merge ------------ You can rejoin two diverging branches of development using gitlink:git-merge[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git merge branchname ------------------------------------------------- merges the development in the branch "branchname" into the current branch. If there are conflicts--for example, if the same file is modified in two different ways in the remote branch and the local branch--then you are warned; the output may look something like this: ------------------------------------------------- $ git pull . next Trying really trivial in-index merge... fatal: Merge requires file-level merging Nope. Merging HEAD with 77976da35a11db4580b80ae27e8d65caf5208086 Merging: 15e2162 world 77976da goodbye found 1 common ancestor(s): d122ed4 initial Auto-merging file.txt CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in file.txt Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result. ------------------------------------------------- Conflict markers are left in the problematic files, and after you resolve the conflicts manually, you can update the index with the contents and run git commit, as you normally would when creating a new file. If you examine the resulting commit using gitk, you will see that it has two parents, one pointing to the top of the current branch, and one to the top of the other branch. In more detail: [[resolving-a-merge]] Resolving a merge ----------------- When a merge isn't resolved automatically, git leaves the index and the working tree in a special state that gives you all the information you need to help resolve the merge. Files with conflicts are marked specially in the index, so until you resolve the problem and update the index, git commit will fail: ------------------------------------------------- $ git commit file.txt: needs merge ------------------------------------------------- Also, git status will list those files as "unmerged". All of the changes that git was able to merge automatically are already added to the index file, so gitlink:git-diff[1] shows only the conflicts. Also, it uses a somewhat unusual syntax: ------------------------------------------------- $ git diff diff --cc file.txt index 802992c,2b60207..0000000 --- a/file.txt +++ b/file.txt @@@ -1,1 -1,1 +1,5 @@@ ++<<<<<<< HEAD:file.txt +Hello world ++======= + Goodbye ++>>>>>>> 77976da35a11db4580b80ae27e8d65caf5208086:file.txt ------------------------------------------------- Recall that the commit which will be commited after we resolve this conflict will have two parents instead of the usual one: one parent will be HEAD, the tip of the current branch; the other will be the tip of the other branch, which is stored temporarily in MERGE_HEAD. The diff above shows the differences between the working-tree version of file.txt and two previous version: one version from HEAD, and one from MERGE_HEAD. So instead of preceding each line by a single "+" or "-", it now uses two columns: the first column is used for differences between the first parent and the working directory copy, and the second for differences between the second parent and the working directory copy. Thus after resolving the conflict in the obvious way, the diff will look like: ------------------------------------------------- $ git diff diff --cc file.txt index 802992c,2b60207..0000000 --- a/file.txt +++ b/file.txt @@@ -1,1 -1,1 +1,1 @@@ - Hello world -Goodbye ++Goodbye world ------------------------------------------------- This shows that our resolved version deleted "Hello world" from the first parent, deleted "Goodbye" from the second parent, and added "Goodbye world", which was previously absent from both. The gitlink:git-log[1] command also provides special help for merges: ------------------------------------------------- $ git log --merge ------------------------------------------------- This will list all commits which exist only on HEAD or on MERGE_HEAD, and which touch an unmerged file. We can now add the resolved version to the index and commit: ------------------------------------------------- $ git add file.txt $ git commit ------------------------------------------------- Note that the commit message will already be filled in for you with some information about the merge. Normally you can just use this default message unchanged, but you may add additional commentary of your own if desired. [[undoing-a-merge]] undoing a merge --------------- If you get stuck and decide to just give up and throw the whole mess away, you can always return to the pre-merge state with ------------------------------------------------- $ git reset --hard HEAD ------------------------------------------------- Or, if you've already commited the merge that you want to throw away, ------------------------------------------------- $ git reset --hard HEAD^ ------------------------------------------------- However, this last command can be dangerous in some cases--never throw away a commit you have already committed if that commit may itself have been merged into another branch, as doing so may confuse further merges. Fast-forward merges ------------------- There is one special case not mentioned above, which is treated differently. Normally, a merge results in a merge commit, with two parents, one pointing at each of the two lines of development that were merged. However, if one of the two lines of development is completely contained within the other--so every commit present in the one is already contained in the other--then git just performs a <>; the head of the current branch is moved forward to point at the head of the merged-in branch, without any new commits being created. Fixing mistakes --------------- If you've messed up the working tree, but haven't yet committed your mistake, you can return the entire working tree to the last committed state with ------------------------------------------------- $ git reset --hard HEAD ------------------------------------------------- If you make a commit that you later wish you hadn't, there are two fundamentally different ways to fix the problem: 1. You can create a new commit that undoes whatever was done by the previous commit. This is the correct thing if your mistake has already been made public. 2. You can go back and modify the old commit. You should never do this if you have already made the history public; git does not normally expect the "history" of a project to change, and cannot correctly perform repeated merges from a branch that has had its history changed. Fixing a mistake with a new commit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Creating a new commit that reverts an earlier change is very easy; just pass the gitlink:git-revert[1] command a reference to the bad commit; for example, to revert the most recent commit: ------------------------------------------------- $ git revert HEAD ------------------------------------------------- This will create a new commit which undoes the change in HEAD. You will be given a chance to edit the commit message for the new commit. You can also revert an earlier change, for example, the next-to-last: ------------------------------------------------- $ git revert HEAD^ ------------------------------------------------- In this case git will attempt to undo the old change while leaving intact any changes made since then. If more recent changes overlap with the changes to be reverted, then you will be asked to fix conflicts manually, just as in the case of <>. Fixing a mistake by editing history ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If the problematic commit is the most recent commit, and you have not yet made that commit public, then you may just <>. Alternatively, you can edit the working directory and update the index to fix your mistake, just as if you were going to <>, then run ------------------------------------------------- $ git commit --amend ------------------------------------------------- which will replace the old commit by a new commit incorporating your changes, giving you a chance to edit the old commit message first. Again, you should never do this to a commit that may already have been merged into another branch; use gitlink:git-revert[1] instead in that case. It is also possible to edit commits further back in the history, but this is an advanced topic to be left for <>. Checking out an old version of a file ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In the process of undoing a previous bad change, you may find it useful to check out an older version of a particular file using gitlink:git-checkout[1]. We've used git checkout before to switch branches, but it has quite different behavior if it is given a path name: the command ------------------------------------------------- $ git checkout HEAD^ path/to/file ------------------------------------------------- replaces path/to/file by the contents it had in the commit HEAD^, and also updates the index to match. It does not change branches. If you just want to look at an old version of the file, without modifying the working directory, you can do that with gitlink:git-show[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git show HEAD^ path/to/file ------------------------------------------------- which will display the given version of the file. Ensuring good performance ------------------------- On large repositories, git depends on compression to keep the history information from taking up to much space on disk or in memory. This compression is not performed automatically. Therefore you should occasionally run gitlink:git-gc[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git gc ------------------------------------------------- to recompress the archive. This can be very time-consuming, so you may prefer to run git-gc when you are not doing other work. Ensuring reliability -------------------- Checking the repository for corruption ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The gitlink:git-fsck[1] command runs a number of self-consistency checks on the repository, and reports on any problems. This may take some time. The most common warning by far is about "dangling" objects: ------------------------------------------------- $ git fsck dangling commit 7281251ddd2a61e38657c827739c57015671a6b3 dangling commit 2706a059f258c6b245f298dc4ff2ccd30ec21a63 dangling commit 13472b7c4b80851a1bc551779171dcb03655e9b5 dangling blob 218761f9d90712d37a9c5e36f406f92202db07eb dangling commit bf093535a34a4d35731aa2bd90fe6b176302f14f dangling commit 8e4bec7f2ddaa268bef999853c25755452100f8e dangling tree d50bb86186bf27b681d25af89d3b5b68382e4085 dangling tree b24c2473f1fd3d91352a624795be026d64c8841f ... ------------------------------------------------- Dangling objects are objects that are harmless, but also unnecessary; you can remove them at any time with gitlink:git-prune[1] or the --prune option to gitlink:git-gc[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git gc --prune ------------------------------------------------- This may be time-consuming. Unlike most other git operations (including git-gc when run without any options), it is not safe to prune while other git operations are in progress in the same repository. For more about dangling objects, see <>. Recovering lost changes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Reflogs ^^^^^^^ Say you modify a branch with gitlink:git-reset[1] --hard, and then realize that the branch was the only reference you had to that point in history. Fortunately, git also keeps a log, called a "reflog", of all the previous values of each branch. So in this case you can still find the old history using, for example, ------------------------------------------------- $ git log master@{1} ------------------------------------------------- This lists the commits reachable from the previous version of the head. This syntax can be used to with any git command that accepts a commit, not just with git log. Some other examples: ------------------------------------------------- $ git show master@{2} # See where the branch pointed 2, $ git show master@{3} # 3, ... changes ago. $ gitk master@{yesterday} # See where it pointed yesterday, $ gitk master@{"1 week ago"} # ... or last week ------------------------------------------------- The reflogs are kept by default for 30 days, after which they may be pruned. See gitlink:git-reflog[1] and gitlink:git-gc[1] to learn how to control this pruning, and see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section of gitlink:git-rev-parse[1] for details. Note that the reflog history is very different from normal git history. While normal history is shared by every repository that works on the same project, the reflog history is not shared: it tells you only about how the branches in your local repository have changed over time. Examining dangling objects ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ In some situations the reflog may not be able to save you. For example, suppose you delete a branch, then realize you need the history it pointed you. The reflog is also deleted; however, if you have not yet pruned the repository, then you may still be able to find the lost commits; run git-fsck and watch for output that mentions "dangling commits": ------------------------------------------------- $ git fsck dangling commit 7281251ddd2a61e38657c827739c57015671a6b3 dangling commit 2706a059f258c6b245f298dc4ff2ccd30ec21a63 dangling commit 13472b7c4b80851a1bc551779171dcb03655e9b5 ... ------------------------------------------------- You can examine one of those dangling commits with, for example, ------------------------------------------------ $ gitk 7281251ddd --not --all ------------------------------------------------ which does what it sounds like: it says that you want to see the commit history that is described by the dangling commit(s), but not the history that is described by all your existing branches and tags. Thus you get exactly the history reachable from that commit that is lost. (And notice that it might not be just one commit: we only report the "tip of the line" as being dangling, but there might be a whole deep and complex commit history that was gotten dropped.) If you decide you want the history back, you can always create a new reference pointing to it, for example, a new branch: ------------------------------------------------ $ git branch recovered-branch 7281251ddd ------------------------------------------------ Sharing development with others =============================== [[getting-updates-with-git-pull]] Getting updates with git pull ----------------------------- After you clone a repository and make a few changes of your own, you may wish to check the original repository for updates and merge them into your own work. We have already seen <> with gitlink:git-fetch[1], and how to merge two branches. So you can merge in changes from the original repository's master branch with: ------------------------------------------------- $ git fetch $ git merge origin/master ------------------------------------------------- However, the gitlink:git-pull[1] command provides a way to do this in one step: ------------------------------------------------- $ git pull origin master ------------------------------------------------- In fact, "origin" is normally the default repository to pull from, and the default branch is normally the HEAD of the remote repository, so often you can accomplish the above with just ------------------------------------------------- $ git pull ------------------------------------------------- See the descriptions of the branch..remote and branch..merge options in gitlink:git-config[1] to learn how to control these defaults depending on the current branch. In addition to saving you keystrokes, "git pull" also helps you by producing a default commit message documenting the branch and repository that you pulled from. (But note that no such commit will be created in the case of a <>; instead, your branch will just be updated to point to the latest commit from the upstream branch). The git-pull command can also be given "." as the "remote" repository, in which case it just merges in a branch from the current repository; so the commands ------------------------------------------------- $ git pull . branch $ git merge branch ------------------------------------------------- are roughly equivalent. The former is actually very commonly used. Submitting patches to a project ------------------------------- If you just have a few changes, the simplest way to submit them may just be to send them as patches in email: First, use gitlink:git-format-patch[1]; for example: ------------------------------------------------- $ git format-patch origin ------------------------------------------------- will produce a numbered series of files in the current directory, one for each patch in the current branch but not in origin/HEAD. You can then import these into your mail client and send them by hand. However, if you have a lot to send at once, you may prefer to use the gitlink:git-send-email[1] script to automate the process. Consult the mailing list for your project first to determine how they prefer such patches be handled. Importing patches to a project ------------------------------ Git also provides a tool called gitlink:git-am[1] (am stands for "apply mailbox"), for importing such an emailed series of patches. Just save all of the patch-containing messages, in order, into a single mailbox file, say "patches.mbox", then run ------------------------------------------------- $ git am -3 patches.mbox ------------------------------------------------- Git will apply each patch in order; if any conflicts are found, it will stop, and you can fix the conflicts as described in "<>". (The "-3" option tells git to perform a merge; if you would prefer it just to abort and leave your tree and index untouched, you may omit that option.) Once the index is updated with the results of the conflict resolution, instead of creating a new commit, just run ------------------------------------------------- $ git am --resolved ------------------------------------------------- and git will create the commit for you and continue applying the remaining patches from the mailbox. The final result will be a series of commits, one for each patch in the original mailbox, with authorship and commit log message each taken from the message containing each patch. [[setting-up-a-public-repository]] Setting up a public repository ------------------------------ Another way to submit changes to a project is to simply tell the maintainer of that project to pull from your repository, exactly as you did in the section "<>". If you and maintainer both have accounts on the same machine, then then you can just pull changes from each other's repositories directly; note that all of the command (gitlink:git-clone[1], git-fetch[1], git-pull[1], etc.) which accept a URL as an argument will also accept a local file patch; so, for example, you can use ------------------------------------------------- $ git clone /path/to/repository $ git pull /path/to/other/repository ------------------------------------------------- If this sort of setup is inconvenient or impossible, another (more common) option is to set up a public repository on a public server. This also allows you to cleanly separate private work in progress from publicly visible work. You will continue to do your day-to-day work in your personal repository, but periodically "push" changes from your personal repository into your public repository, allowing other developers to pull from that repository. So the flow of changes, in a situation where there is one other developer with a public repository, looks like this: you push your personal repo ------------------> your public repo ^ | | | | you pull | they pull | | | | | they push V their public repo <------------------- their repo Now, assume your personal repository is in the directory ~/proj. We first create a new clone of the repository: ------------------------------------------------- $ git clone --bare proj-clone.git ------------------------------------------------- The resulting directory proj-clone.git will contains a "bare" git repository--it is just the contents of the ".git" directory, without a checked-out copy of a working directory. Next, copy proj-clone.git to the server where you plan to host the public repository. You can use scp, rsync, or whatever is most convenient. If somebody else maintains the public server, they may already have set up a git service for you, and you may skip to the section "<>", below. Otherwise, the following sections explain how to export your newly created public repository: [[exporting-via-http]] Exporting a git repository via http ----------------------------------- The git protocol gives better performance and reliability, but on a host with a web server set up, http exports may be simpler to set up. All you need to do is place the newly created bare git repository in a directory that is exported by the web server, and make some adjustments to give web clients some extra information they need: ------------------------------------------------- $ mv proj.git /home/you/public_html/proj.git $ cd proj.git $ git update-server-info $ chmod a+x hooks/post-update ------------------------------------------------- (For an explanation of the last two lines, see gitlink:git-update-server-info[1], and the documentation link:hooks.txt[Hooks used by git].) Advertise the url of proj.git. Anybody else should then be able to clone or pull from that url, for example with a commandline like: ------------------------------------------------- $ git clone http://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git ------------------------------------------------- (See also link:howto/setup-git-server-over-http.txt[setup-git-server-over-http] for a slightly more sophisticated setup using WebDAV which also allows pushing over http.) [[exporting-via-git]] Exporting a git repository via the git protocol ----------------------------------------------- This is the preferred method. For now, we refer you to the gitlink:git-daemon[1] man page for instructions. (See especially the examples section.) [[pushing-changes-to-a-public-repository]] Pushing changes to a public repository -------------------------------------- Note that the two techniques outline above (exporting via <> or <>) allow other maintainers to fetch your latest changes, but they do not allow write access, which you will need to update the public repository with the latest changes created in your private repository. The simplest way to do this is using gitlink:git-push[1] and ssh; to update the remote branch named "master" with the latest state of your branch named "master", run ------------------------------------------------- $ git push ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git master:master ------------------------------------------------- or just ------------------------------------------------- $ git push ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git master ------------------------------------------------- As with git-fetch, git-push will complain if this does not result in a <>. Normally this is a sign of something wrong. However, if you are sure you know what you're doing, you may force git-push to perform the update anyway by proceeding the branch name by a plus sign: ------------------------------------------------- $ git push ssh://yourserver.com/~you/proj.git +master ------------------------------------------------- As with git-fetch, you may also set up configuration options to save typing; so, for example, after ------------------------------------------------- $ cat >.git/config <.url, branch..remote, and remote..push options in gitlink:git-config[1] for details. Setting up a shared repository ------------------------------ Another way to collaborate is by using a model similar to that commonly used in CVS, where several developers with special rights all push to and pull from a single shared repository. See link:cvs-migration.txt[git for CVS users] for instructions on how to set this up. Allow web browsing of a repository ---------------------------------- The gitweb cgi script provides users an easy way to browse your project's files and history without having to install git; see the file gitweb/README in the git source tree for instructions on setting it up. Examples -------- TODO: topic branches, typical roles as in everyday.txt, ? [[cleaning-up-history]] Rewriting history and maintaining patch series ============================================== Normally commits are only added to a project, never taken away or replaced. Git is designed with this assumption, and violating it will cause git's merge machinery (for example) to do the wrong thing. However, there is a situation in which it can be useful to violate this assumption. Creating the perfect patch series --------------------------------- Suppose you are a contributor to a large project, and you want to add a complicated feature, and to present it to the other developers in a way that makes it easy for them to read your changes, verify that they are correct, and understand why you made each change. If you present all of your changes as a single patch (or commit), they may find it is too much to digest all at once. If you present them with the entire history of your work, complete with mistakes, corrections, and dead ends, they may be overwhelmed. So the ideal is usually to produce a series of patches such that: 1. Each patch can be applied in order. 2. Each patch includes a single logical change, together with a message explaining the change. 3. No patch introduces a regression: after applying any initial part of the series, the resulting project still compiles and works, and has no bugs that it didn't have before. 4. The complete series produces the same end result as your own (probably much messier!) development process did. We will introduce some tools that can help you do this, explain how to use them, and then explain some of the problems that can arise because you are rewriting history. Keeping a patch series up to date using git-rebase -------------------------------------------------- Suppose you have a series of commits in a branch "mywork", which originally branched off from "origin". Suppose you create a branch "mywork" on a remote-tracking branch "origin", and created some commits on top of it: ------------------------------------------------- $ git checkout -b mywork origin $ vi file.txt $ git commit $ vi otherfile.txt $ git commit ... ------------------------------------------------- You have performed no merges into mywork, so it is just a simple linear sequence of patches on top of "origin": o--o--o <-- origin \ o--o--o <-- mywork Some more interesting work has been done in the upstream project, and "origin" has advanced: o--o--O--o--o--o <-- origin \ a--b--c <-- mywork At this point, you could use "pull" to merge your changes back in; the result would create a new merge commit, like this: o--o--O--o--o--o <-- origin \ \ a--b--c--m <-- mywork However, if you prefer to keep the history in mywork a simple series of commits without any merges, you may instead choose to use gitlink:git-rebase[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git checkout mywork $ git rebase origin ------------------------------------------------- This will remove each of your commits from mywork, temporarily saving them as patches (in a directory named ".dotest"), update mywork to point at the latest version of origin, then apply each of the saved patches to the new mywork. The result will look like: o--o--O--o--o--o <-- origin \ a'--b'--c' <-- mywork In the process, it may discover conflicts. In that case it will stop and allow you to fix the conflicts; after fixing conflicts, use "git add" to update the index with those contents, and then, instead of running git-commit, just run ------------------------------------------------- $ git rebase --continue ------------------------------------------------- and git will continue applying the rest of the patches. At any point you may use the --abort option to abort this process and return mywork to the state it had before you started the rebase: ------------------------------------------------- $ git rebase --abort ------------------------------------------------- Reordering or selecting from a patch series ------------------------------------------- Given one existing commit, the gitlink:git-cherry-pick[1] command allows you to apply the change introduced by that commit and create a new commit that records it. So, for example, if "mywork" points to a series of patches on top of "origin", you might do something like: ------------------------------------------------- $ git checkout -b mywork-new origin $ gitk origin..mywork & ------------------------------------------------- And browse through the list of patches in the mywork branch using gitk, applying them (possibly in a different order) to mywork-new using cherry-pick, and possibly modifying them as you go using commit --amend. Another technique is to use git-format-patch to create a series of patches, then reset the state to before the patches: ------------------------------------------------- $ git format-patch origin $ git reset --hard origin ------------------------------------------------- Then modify, reorder, or eliminate patches as preferred before applying them again with gitlink:git-am[1]. Other tools ----------- There are numerous other tools, such as stgit, which exist for the purpose of maintaining a patch series. These are out of the scope of this manual. Problems with rewriting history ------------------------------- The primary problem with rewriting the history of a branch has to do with merging. Suppose somebody fetches your branch and merges it into their branch, with a result something like this: o--o--O--o--o--o <-- origin \ \ t--t--t--m <-- their branch: Then suppose you modify the last three commits: o--o--o <-- new head of origin / o--o--O--o--o--o <-- old head of origin If we examined all this history together in one repository, it will look like: o--o--o <-- new head of origin / o--o--O--o--o--o <-- old head of origin \ \ t--t--t--m <-- their branch: Git has no way of knowing that the new head is an updated version of the old head; it treats this situation exactly the same as it would if two developers had independently done the work on the old and new heads in parallel. At this point, if someone attempts to merge the new head in to their branch, git will attempt to merge together the two (old and new) lines of development, instead of trying to replace the old by the new. The results are likely to be unexpected. You may still choose to publish branches whose history is rewritten, and it may be useful for others to be able to fetch those branches in order to examine or test them, but they should not attempt to pull such branches into their own work. For true distributed development that supports proper merging, published branches should never be rewritten. Advanced branch management ========================== Fetching individual branches ---------------------------- Instead of using gitlink:git-remote[1], you can also choose just to update one branch at a time, and to store it locally under an arbitrary name: ------------------------------------------------- $ git fetch origin todo:my-todo-work ------------------------------------------------- The first argument, "origin", just tells git to fetch from the repository you originally cloned from. The second argument tells git to fetch the branch named "todo" from the remote repository, and to store it locally under the name refs/heads/my-todo-work. You can also fetch branches from other repositories; so ------------------------------------------------- $ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git master:example-master ------------------------------------------------- will create a new branch named "example-master" and store in it the branch named "master" from the repository at the given URL. If you already have a branch named example-master, it will attempt to "fast-forward" to the commit given by example.com's master branch. So next we explain what a fast-forward is: [[fast-forwards]] Understanding git history: fast-forwards ---------------------------------------- In the previous example, when updating an existing branch, "git fetch" checks to make sure that the most recent commit on the remote branch is a descendant of the most recent commit on your copy of the branch before updating your copy of the branch to point at the new commit. Git calls this process a "fast forward". A fast forward looks something like this: o--o--o--o <-- old head of the branch \ o--o--o <-- new head of the branch In some cases it is possible that the new head will *not* actually be a descendant of the old head. For example, the developer may have realized she made a serious mistake, and decided to backtrack, resulting in a situation like: o--o--o--o--a--b <-- old head of the branch \ o--o--o <-- new head of the branch In this case, "git fetch" will fail, and print out a warning. In that case, you can still force git to update to the new head, as described in the following section. However, note that in the situation above this may mean losing the commits labeled "a" and "b", unless you've already created a reference of your own pointing to them. Forcing git fetch to do non-fast-forward updates ------------------------------------------------ If git fetch fails because the new head of a branch is not a descendant of the old head, you may force the update with: ------------------------------------------------- $ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git +master:refs/remotes/example/master ------------------------------------------------- Note the addition of the "+" sign. Be aware that commits which the old version of example/master pointed at may be lost, as we saw in the previous section. Configuring remote branches --------------------------- We saw above that "origin" is just a shortcut to refer to the repository which you originally cloned from. This information is stored in git configuration variables, which you can see using gitlink:git-config[1]: ------------------------------------------------- $ git config -l core.repositoryformatversion=0 core.filemode=true core.logallrefupdates=true remote.origin.url=git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* branch.master.remote=origin branch.master.merge=refs/heads/master ------------------------------------------------- If there are other repositories that you also use frequently, you can create similar configuration options to save typing; for example, after ------------------------------------------------- $ git config remote.example.url git://example.com/proj.git ------------------------------------------------- then the following two commands will do the same thing: ------------------------------------------------- $ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git master:refs/remotes/example/master $ git fetch example master:refs/remotes/example/master ------------------------------------------------- Even better, if you add one more option: ------------------------------------------------- $ git config remote.example.fetch master:refs/remotes/example/master ------------------------------------------------- then the following commands will all do the same thing: ------------------------------------------------- $ git fetch git://example.com/proj.git master:ref/remotes/example/master $ git fetch example master:ref/remotes/example/master $ git fetch example example/master $ git fetch example ------------------------------------------------- You can also add a "+" to force the update each time: ------------------------------------------------- $ git config remote.example.fetch +master:ref/remotes/example/master ------------------------------------------------- Don't do this unless you're sure you won't mind "git fetch" possibly throwing away commits on mybranch. Also note that all of the above configuration can be performed by directly editing the file .git/config instead of using gitlink:git-config[1]. See gitlink:git-config[1] for more details on the configuration options mentioned above. Git internals ============= There are two object abstractions: the "object database", and the "current directory cache" aka "index". The Object Database ------------------- The object database is literally just a content-addressable collection of objects. All objects are named by their content, which is approximated by the SHA1 hash of the object itself. Objects may refer to other objects (by referencing their SHA1 hash), and so you can build up a hierarchy of objects. All objects have a statically determined "type" aka "tag", which is determined at object creation time, and which identifies the format of the object (i.e. how it is used, and how it can refer to other objects). There are currently four different object types: "blob", "tree", "commit" and "tag". A "blob" object cannot refer to any other object, and is, like the type implies, a pure storage object containing some user data. It is used to actually store the file data, i.e. a blob object is associated with some particular version of some file. A "tree" object is an object that ties one or more "blob" objects into a directory structure. In addition, a tree object can refer to other tree objects, thus creating a directory hierarchy. A "commit" object ties such directory hierarchies together into a DAG of revisions - each "commit" is associated with exactly one tree (the directory hierarchy at the time of the commit). In addition, a "commit" refers to one or more "parent" commit objects that describe the history of how we arrived at that directory hierarchy. As a special case, a commit object with no parents is called the "root" object, and is the point of an initial project commit. Each project must have at least one root, and while you can tie several different root objects together into one project by creating a commit object which has two or more separate roots as its ultimate parents, that's probably just going to confuse people. So aim for the notion of "one root object per project", even if git itself does not enforce that. A "tag" object symbolically identifies and can be used to sign other objects. It contains the identifier and type of another object, a symbolic name (of course!) and, optionally, a signature. Regardless of object type, all objects share the following characteristics: they are all deflated with zlib, and have a header that not only specifies their type, but also provides size information about the data in the object. It's worth noting that the SHA1 hash that is used to name the object is the hash of the original data plus this header, so `sha1sum` 'file' does not match the object name for 'file'. (Historical note: in the dawn of the age of git the hash was the sha1 of the 'compressed' object.) As a result, the general consistency of an object can always be tested independently of the contents or the type of the object: all objects can be validated by verifying that (a) their hashes match the content of the file and (b) the object successfully inflates to a stream of bytes that forms a sequence of + + + + . The structured objects can further have their structure and connectivity to other objects verified. This is generally done with the `git-fsck` program, which generates a full dependency graph of all objects, and verifies their internal consistency (in addition to just verifying their superficial consistency through the hash). The object types in some more detail: Blob Object ----------- A "blob" object is nothing but a binary blob of data, and doesn't refer to anything else. There is no signature or any other verification of the data, so while the object is consistent (it 'is' indexed by its sha1 hash, so the data itself is certainly correct), it has absolutely no other attributes. No name associations, no permissions. It is purely a blob of data (i.e. normally "file contents"). In particular, since the blob is entirely defined by its data, if two files in a directory tree (or in multiple different versions of the repository) have the same contents, they will share the same blob object. The object is totally independent of its location in the directory tree, and renaming a file does not change the object that file is associated with in any way. A blob is typically created when gitlink:git-update-index[1] is run, and its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-cat-file[1]. Tree Object ----------- The next hierarchical object type is the "tree" object. A tree object is a list of mode/name/blob data, sorted by name. Alternatively, the mode data may specify a directory mode, in which case instead of naming a blob, that name is associated with another TREE object. Like the "blob" object, a tree object is uniquely determined by the set contents, and so two separate but identical trees will always share the exact same object. This is true at all levels, i.e. it's true for a "leaf" tree (which does not refer to any other trees, only blobs) as well as for a whole subdirectory. For that reason a "tree" object is just a pure data abstraction: it has no history, no signatures, no verification of validity, except that since the contents are again protected by the hash itself, we can trust that the tree is immutable and its contents never change. So you can trust the contents of a tree to be valid, the same way you can trust the contents of a blob, but you don't know where those contents 'came' from. Side note on trees: since a "tree" object is a sorted list of "filename+content", you can create a diff between two trees without actually having to unpack two trees. Just ignore all common parts, and your diff will look right. In other words, you can effectively (and efficiently) tell the difference between any two random trees by O(n) where "n" is the size of the difference, rather than the size of the tree. Side note 2 on trees: since the name of a "blob" depends entirely and exclusively on its contents (i.e. there are no names or permissions involved), you can see trivial renames or permission changes by noticing that the blob stayed the same. However, renames with data changes need a smarter "diff" implementation. A tree is created with gitlink:git-write-tree[1] and its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-ls-tree[1]. Two trees can be compared with gitlink:git-diff-tree[1]. Commit Object ------------- The "commit" object is an object that introduces the notion of history into the picture. In contrast to the other objects, it doesn't just describe the physical state of a tree, it describes how we got there, and why. A "commit" is defined by the tree-object that it results in, the parent commits (zero, one or more) that led up to that point, and a comment on what happened. Again, a commit is not trusted per se: the contents are well-defined and "safe" due to the cryptographically strong signatures at all levels, but there is no reason to believe that the tree is "good" or that the merge information makes sense. The parents do not have to actually have any relationship with the result, for example. Note on commits: unlike real SCM's, commits do not contain rename information or file mode change information. All of that is implicit in the trees involved (the result tree, and the result trees of the parents), and describing that makes no sense in this idiotic file manager. A commit is created with gitlink:git-commit-tree[1] and its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-cat-file[1]. Trust ----- An aside on the notion of "trust". Trust is really outside the scope of "git", but it's worth noting a few things. First off, since everything is hashed with SHA1, you 'can' trust that an object is intact and has not been messed with by external sources. So the name of an object uniquely identifies a known state - just not a state that you may want to trust. Furthermore, since the SHA1 signature of a commit refers to the SHA1 signatures of the tree it is associated with and the signatures of the parent, a single named commit specifies uniquely a whole set of history, with full contents. You can't later fake any step of the way once you have the name of a commit. So to introduce some real trust in the system, the only thing you need to do is to digitally sign just 'one' special note, which includes the name of a top-level commit. Your digital signature shows others that you trust that commit, and the immutability of the history of commits tells others that they can trust the whole history. In other words, you can easily validate a whole archive by just sending out a single email that tells the people the name (SHA1 hash) of the top commit, and digitally sign that email using something like GPG/PGP. To assist in this, git also provides the tag object... Tag Object ---------- Git provides the "tag" object to simplify creating, managing and exchanging symbolic and signed tokens. The "tag" object at its simplest simply symbolically identifies another object by containing the sha1, type and symbolic name. However it can optionally contain additional signature information (which git doesn't care about as long as there's less than 8k of it). This can then be verified externally to git. Note that despite the tag features, "git" itself only handles content integrity; the trust framework (and signature provision and verification) has to come from outside. A tag is created with gitlink:git-mktag[1], its data can be accessed by gitlink:git-cat-file[1], and the signature can be verified by gitlink:git-verify-tag[1]. The "index" aka "Current Directory Cache" ----------------------------------------- The index is a simple binary file, which contains an efficient representation of a virtual directory content at some random time. It does so by a simple array that associates a set of names, dates, permissions and content (aka "blob") objects together. The cache is always kept ordered by name, and names are unique (with a few very specific rules) at any point in time, but the cache has no long-term meaning, and can be partially updated at any time. In particular, the index certainly does not need to be consistent with the current directory contents (in fact, most operations will depend on different ways to make the index 'not' be consistent with the directory hierarchy), but it has three very important attributes: '(a) it can re-generate the full state it caches (not just the directory structure: it contains pointers to the "blob" objects so that it can regenerate the data too)' As a special case, there is a clear and unambiguous one-way mapping from a current directory cache to a "tree object", which can be efficiently created from just the current directory cache without actually looking at any other data. So a directory cache at any one time uniquely specifies one and only one "tree" object (but has additional data to make it easy to match up that tree object with what has happened in the directory) '(b) it has efficient methods for finding inconsistencies between that cached state ("tree object waiting to be instantiated") and the current state.' '(c) it can additionally efficiently represent information about merge conflicts between different tree objects, allowing each pathname to be associated with sufficient information about the trees involved that you can create a three-way merge between them.' Those are the three ONLY things that the directory cache does. It's a cache, and the normal operation is to re-generate it completely from a known tree object, or update/compare it with a live tree that is being developed. If you blow the directory cache away entirely, you generally haven't lost any information as long as you have the name of the tree that it described. At the same time, the index is at the same time also the staging area for creating new trees, and creating a new tree always involves a controlled modification of the index file. In particular, the index file can have the representation of an intermediate tree that has not yet been instantiated. So the index can be thought of as a write-back cache, which can contain dirty information that has not yet been written back to the backing store. The Workflow ------------ Generally, all "git" operations work on the index file. Some operations work *purely* on the index file (showing the current state of the index), but most operations move data to and from the index file. Either from the database or from the working directory. Thus there are four main combinations: working directory -> index ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You update the index with information from the working directory with the gitlink:git-update-index[1] command. You generally update the index information by just specifying the filename you want to update, like so: ------------------------------------------------- $ git-update-index filename ------------------------------------------------- but to avoid common mistakes with filename globbing etc, the command will not normally add totally new entries or remove old entries, i.e. it will normally just update existing cache entries. To tell git that yes, you really do realize that certain files no longer exist, or that new files should be added, you should use the `--remove` and `--add` flags respectively. NOTE! A `--remove` flag does 'not' mean that subsequent filenames will necessarily be removed: if the files still exist in your directory structure, the index will be updated with their new status, not removed. The only thing `--remove` means is that update-cache will be considering a removed file to be a valid thing, and if the file really does not exist any more, it will update the index accordingly. As a special case, you can also do `git-update-index --refresh`, which will refresh the "stat" information of each index to match the current stat information. It will 'not' update the object status itself, and it will only update the fields that are used to quickly test whether an object still matches its old backing store object. index -> object database ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You write your current index file to a "tree" object with the program ------------------------------------------------- $ git-write-tree ------------------------------------------------- that doesn't come with any options - it will just write out the current index into the set of tree objects that describe that state, and it will return the name of the resulting top-level tree. You can use that tree to re-generate the index at any time by going in the other direction: object database -> index ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You read a "tree" file from the object database, and use that to populate (and overwrite - don't do this if your index contains any unsaved state that you might want to restore later!) your current index. Normal operation is just ------------------------------------------------- $ git-read-tree ------------------------------------------------- and your index file will now be equivalent to the tree that you saved earlier. However, that is only your 'index' file: your working directory contents have not been modified. index -> working directory ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You update your working directory from the index by "checking out" files. This is not a very common operation, since normally you'd just keep your files updated, and rather than write to your working directory, you'd tell the index files about the changes in your working directory (i.e. `git-update-index`). However, if you decide to jump to a new version, or check out somebody else's version, or just restore a previous tree, you'd populate your index file with read-tree, and then you need to check out the result with ------------------------------------------------- $ git-checkout-index filename ------------------------------------------------- or, if you want to check out all of the index, use `-a`. NOTE! git-checkout-index normally refuses to overwrite old files, so if you have an old version of the tree already checked out, you will need to use the "-f" flag ('before' the "-a" flag or the filename) to 'force' the checkout. Finally, there are a few odds and ends which are not purely moving from one representation to the other: Tying it all together ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To commit a tree you have instantiated with "git-write-tree", you'd create a "commit" object that refers to that tree and the history behind it - most notably the "parent" commits that preceded it in history. Normally a "commit" has one parent: the previous state of the tree before a certain change was made. However, sometimes it can have two or more parent commits, in which case we call it a "merge", due to the fact that such a commit brings together ("merges") two or more previous states represented by other commits. In other words, while a "tree" represents a particular directory state of a working directory, a "commit" represents that state in "time", and explains how we got there. You create a commit object by giving it the tree that describes the state at the time of the commit, and a list of parents: ------------------------------------------------- $ git-commit-tree -p [-p ..] ------------------------------------------------- and then giving the reason for the commit on stdin (either through redirection from a pipe or file, or by just typing it at the tty). git-commit-tree will return the name of the object that represents that commit, and you should save it away for later use. Normally, you'd commit a new `HEAD` state, and while git doesn't care where you save the note about that state, in practice we tend to just write the result to the file pointed at by `.git/HEAD`, so that we can always see what the last committed state was. Here is an ASCII art by Jon Loeliger that illustrates how various pieces fit together. ------------ commit-tree commit obj +----+ | | | | V V +-----------+ | Object DB | | Backing | | Store | +-----------+ ^ write-tree | | tree obj | | | | read-tree | | tree obj V +-----------+ | Index | | "cache" | +-----------+ update-index ^ blob obj | | | | checkout-index -u | | checkout-index stat | | blob obj V +-----------+ | Working | | Directory | +-----------+ ------------ Examining the data ------------------ You can examine the data represented in the object database and the index with various helper tools. For every object, you can use gitlink:git-cat-file[1] to examine details about the object: ------------------------------------------------- $ git-cat-file -t ------------------------------------------------- shows the type of the object, and once you have the type (which is usually implicit in where you find the object), you can use ------------------------------------------------- $ git-cat-file blob|tree|commit|tag ------------------------------------------------- to show its contents. NOTE! Trees have binary content, and as a result there is a special helper for showing that content, called `git-ls-tree`, which turns the binary content into a more easily readable form. It's especially instructive to look at "commit" objects, since those tend to be small and fairly self-explanatory. In particular, if you follow the convention of having the top commit name in `.git/HEAD`, you can do ------------------------------------------------- $ git-cat-file commit HEAD ------------------------------------------------- to see what the top commit was. Merging multiple trees ---------------------- Git helps you do a three-way merge, which you can expand to n-way by repeating the merge procedure arbitrary times until you finally "commit" the state. The normal situation is that you'd only do one three-way merge (two parents), and commit it, but if you like to, you can do multiple parents in one go. To do a three-way merge, you need the two sets of "commit" objects that you want to merge, use those to find the closest common parent (a third "commit" object), and then use those commit objects to find the state of the directory ("tree" object) at these points. To get the "base" for the merge, you first look up the common parent of two commits with ------------------------------------------------- $ git-merge-base ------------------------------------------------- which will return you the commit they are both based on. You should now look up the "tree" objects of those commits, which you can easily do with (for example) ------------------------------------------------- $ git-cat-file commit | head -1 ------------------------------------------------- since the tree object information is always the first line in a commit object. Once you know the three trees you are going to merge (the one "original" tree, aka the common case, and the two "result" trees, aka the branches you want to merge), you do a "merge" read into the index. This will complain if it has to throw away your old index contents, so you should make sure that you've committed those - in fact you would normally always do a merge against your last commit (which should thus match what you have in your current index anyway). To do the merge, do ------------------------------------------------- $ git-read-tree -m -u ------------------------------------------------- which will do all trivial merge operations for you directly in the index file, and you can just write the result out with `git-write-tree`. Merging multiple trees, continued --------------------------------- Sadly, many merges aren't trivial. If there are files that have been added.moved or removed, or if both branches have modified the same file, you will be left with an index tree that contains "merge entries" in it. Such an index tree can 'NOT' be written out to a tree object, and you will have to resolve any such merge clashes using other tools before you can write out the result. You can examine such index state with `git-ls-files --unmerged` command. An example: ------------------------------------------------ $ git-read-tree -m $orig HEAD $target $ git-ls-files --unmerged 100644 263414f423d0e4d70dae8fe53fa34614ff3e2860 1 hello.c 100644 06fa6a24256dc7e560efa5687fa84b51f0263c3a 2 hello.c 100644 cc44c73eb783565da5831b4d820c962954019b69 3 hello.c ------------------------------------------------ Each line of the `git-ls-files --unmerged` output begins with the blob mode bits, blob SHA1, 'stage number', and the filename. The 'stage number' is git's way to say which tree it came from: stage 1 corresponds to `$orig` tree, stage 2 `HEAD` tree, and stage3 `$target` tree. Earlier we said that trivial merges are done inside `git-read-tree -m`. For example, if the file did not change from `$orig` to `HEAD` nor `$target`, or if the file changed from `$orig` to `HEAD` and `$orig` to `$target` the same way, obviously the final outcome is what is in `HEAD`. What the above example shows is that file `hello.c` was changed from `$orig` to `HEAD` and `$orig` to `$target` in a different way. You could resolve this by running your favorite 3-way merge program, e.g. `diff3` or `merge`, on the blob objects from these three stages yourself, like this: ------------------------------------------------ $ git-cat-file blob 263414f... >hello.c~1 $ git-cat-file blob 06fa6a2... >hello.c~2 $ git-cat-file blob cc44c73... >hello.c~3 $ merge hello.c~2 hello.c~1 hello.c~3 ------------------------------------------------ This would leave the merge result in `hello.c~2` file, along with conflict markers if there are conflicts. After verifying the merge result makes sense, you can tell git what the final merge result for this file is by: ------------------------------------------------- $ mv -f hello.c~2 hello.c $ git-update-index hello.c ------------------------------------------------- When a path is in unmerged state, running `git-update-index` for that path tells git to mark the path resolved. The above is the description of a git merge at the lowest level, to help you understand what conceptually happens under the hood. In practice, nobody, not even git itself, uses three `git-cat-file` for this. There is `git-merge-index` program that extracts the stages to temporary files and calls a "merge" script on it: ------------------------------------------------- $ git-merge-index git-merge-one-file hello.c ------------------------------------------------- and that is what higher level `git resolve` is implemented with. How git stores objects efficiently: pack files ---------------------------------------------- We've seen how git stores each object in a file named after the object's SHA1 hash. Unfortunately this system becomes inefficient once a project has a lot of objects. Try this on an old project: ------------------------------------------------ $ git count-objects 6930 objects, 47620 kilobytes ------------------------------------------------ The first number is the number of objects which are kept in individual files. The second is the amount of space taken up by those "loose" objects. You can save space and make git faster by moving these loose objects in to a "pack file", which stores a group of objects in an efficient compressed format; the details of how pack files are formatted can be found in link:technical/pack-format.txt[technical/pack-format.txt]. To put the loose objects into a pack, just run git repack: ------------------------------------------------ $ git repack Generating pack... Done counting 6020 objects. Deltifying 6020 objects. 100% (6020/6020) done Writing 6020 objects. 100% (6020/6020) done Total 6020, written 6020 (delta 4070), reused 0 (delta 0) Pack pack-3e54ad29d5b2e05838c75df582c65257b8d08e1c created. ------------------------------------------------ You can then run ------------------------------------------------ $ git prune ------------------------------------------------ to remove any of the "loose" objects that are now contained in the pack. This will also remove any unreferenced objects (which may be created when, for example, you use "git reset" to remove a commit). You can verify that the loose objects are gone by looking at the .git/objects directory or by running ------------------------------------------------ $ git count-objects 0 objects, 0 kilobytes ------------------------------------------------ Although the object files are gone, any commands that refer to those objects will work exactly as they did before. The gitlink:git-gc[1] command performs packing, pruning, and more for you, so is normally the only high-level command you need. [[dangling-objects]] Dangling objects ---------------- The gitlink:git-fsck[1] command will sometimes complain about dangling objects. They are not a problem. The most common cause of dangling objects is that you've rebased a branch, or you have pulled from somebody else who rebased a branch--see <>. In that case, the old head of the original branch still exists, as does obviously everything it pointed to. The branch pointer itself just doesn't, since you replaced it with another one. There are also other situations too that cause dangling objects. For example, a "dangling blob" may arise because you did a "git add" of a file, but then, before you actually committed it and made it part of the bigger picture, you changed something else in that file and committed that *updated* thing - the old state that you added originally ends up not being pointed to by any commit or tree, so it's now a dangling blob object. Similarly, when the "recursive" merge strategy runs, and finds that there are criss-cross merges and thus more than one merge base (which is fairly unusual, but it does happen), it will generate one temporary midway tree (or possibly even more, if you had lots of criss-crossing merges and more than two merge bases) as a temporary internal merge base, and again, those are real objects, but the end result will not end up pointing to them, so they end up "dangling" in your repository. Generally, dangling objects aren't anything to worry about. They can even be very useful: if you screw something up, the dangling objects can be how you recover your old tree (say, you did a rebase, and realized that you really didn't want to - you can look at what dangling objects you have, and decide to reset your head to some old dangling state). For commits, the most useful thing to do with dangling objects tends to be to do a simple ------------------------------------------------ $ gitk --not --all ------------------------------------------------ For blobs and trees, you can't do the same, but you can examine them. You can just do ------------------------------------------------ $ git show ------------------------------------------------ to show what the contents of the blob were (or, for a tree, basically what the "ls" for that directory was), and that may give you some idea of what the operation was that left that dangling object. Usually, dangling blobs and trees aren't very interesting. They're almost always the result of either being a half-way mergebase (the blob will often even have the conflict markers from a merge in it, if you have had conflicting merges that you fixed up by hand), or simply because you interrupted a "git fetch" with ^C or something like that, leaving _some_ of the new objects in the object database, but just dangling and useless. Anyway, once you are sure that you're not interested in any dangling state, you can just prune all unreachable objects: ------------------------------------------------ $ git prune ------------------------------------------------ and they'll be gone. But you should only run "git prune" on a quiescent repository - it's kind of like doing a filesystem fsck recovery: you don't want to do that while the filesystem is mounted. (The same is true of "git-fsck" itself, btw - but since git-fsck never actually *changes* the repository, it just reports on what it found, git-fsck itself is never "dangerous" to run. Running it while somebody is actually changing the repository can cause confusing and scary messages, but it won't actually do anything bad. In contrast, running "git prune" while somebody is actively changing the repository is a *BAD* idea). Glossary of git terms ===================== include::glossary.txt[] Notes and todo list for this manual =================================== This is a work in progress. The basic requirements: - It must be readable in order, from beginning to end, by someone intelligent with a basic grasp of the unix commandline, but without any special knowledge of git. If necessary, any other prerequisites should be specifically mentioned as they arise. - Whenever possible, section headings should clearly describe the task they explain how to do, in language that requires no more knowledge than necessary: for example, "importing patches into a project" rather than "the git-am command" Think about how to create a clear chapter dependency graph that will allow people to get to important topics without necessarily reading everything in between. Say something about .gitignore. Scan Documentation/ for other stuff left out; in particular: howto's some of technical/? hooks list of commands in gitlink:git[1] Scan email archives for other stuff left out Scan man pages to see if any assume more background than this manual provides. Simplify beginning by suggesting disconnected head instead of temporary branch creation? Explain how to refer to file stages in the "how to resolve a merge" section: diff -1, -2, -3, --ours, --theirs :1:/path notation. The "git ls-files --unmerged --stage" thing is sorta useful too, actually. And note gitk --merge. Add more good examples. Entire sections of just cookbook examples might be a good idea; maybe make an "advanced examples" section a standard end-of-chapter section? Include cross-references to the glossary, where appropriate. Document shallow clones? See draft 1.5.0 release notes for some documentation. Add a sectin on working with other version control systems, including CVS, Subversion, and just imports of series of release tarballs. More details on gitweb? Write a chapter on using plumbing and writing scripts.