On 21 August 2011 13:53, Michael Witten <mfwitten@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 13:42 -0700, Hilco Wijbenga > <hilco.wijbenga@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Isn't a branch simply a way to track changes separately? > > Well, what does that mean, really? You can certainly use branches to > help you achieve that goal. It means my commits are chained together separate from, say, master. > In git usage, a `branch' is just a human-readable name for any given > commit object; it points to a commit object, and you can change to > which commit it points. Furthermore, to help you work with commit > lineages, some of the git machinery updates these branches (or > `pointers', if you like) automatically (for instance, when you make a > new commit object with `git commit', then the `current branch' is > updated to point to the newly created commit object). > > Of course, 2 different branches may be used to point to the same commit object. > > You should really think of your repository as a giant web of commit > objects (or, more technically, as a directed acyclic graph where each > node is a commit object); a commit object can point 'backwards' > towards its parent commit objects. A branch (like `master') just > points to one of these commit objects at any given time (that is, a > branch just gives a nice human-readable label by which to reference > one of these commit objects at any given time). Yes, I agree with all of that (especially the last sentence). I don't see how it changes the concept of a branch is, though. You are, I think, simply listing the technical implementation. > See here too: > > http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2350536&cid=36903136 Because of the revision number you have to go "the wrong way". Any single commit can have many children but a branch only points to a single, unique commit (or at least that's how I understand it). I feel like we're talking in circles. I get (and even agree with) what you're saying but I don't see how it changes the concept of a branch. In any case, what I'm more interested in is knowing whether we can (optionally) add state (i.e. untracked/ignored files and unstaged changes) to a branch. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html