Alice: merging without conflicts

Alice knows that branches must be integrated often to avoid problems, so she will merge the vocabulary branch with the main one.

Lab

• First, she checks that she is in the main branch

git branch

• Now, she checks the differences between both branches

git diff main vocabulary-chapter-01

• There are some long lines, so maybe it would be better to get the difference without using delta. To deactivate it, Alice just pipes the output of git to another command

git diff main vocabulary-chapter-01 | cat -  # diff without using delta

• This is the moment to create a new commit with the content of both versions merged

git merge vocabulary-chapter-01 -m "Merged vocabulary"

• Now the main branch contains all the words, plus the stranger’s profession:

 cat chapter-01.md \
   | grep -e sand -e shore -e beach -e "lighthouse keeper" -C 9999 --color

• The log of the main branch will include the changes performed on the merged one:

git log

• As time passes and we keep adding commits to the history, it is more and more convenient to simplify the output of the log

git log --oneline

git log --oneline --gr███

git log --oneline --graph

Diagrams