Selecting a branching and merging strategy
Source control allows you to keep a history of all of the changes you have made to your files, and also allows working separately from your team members for a while if you so desire. We call this branching. When you are branching in source control, you fork the line of changes currently registered. We call such a fork a branch. A branch allows you to temporarily isolate some work from the rest. At any point, if you want to integrate the changes from a branch with the changes on the other fork, you can merge these changes back. Branches are often used for working on not-yet-complete features, proofs of concept, or hotfixes. Using branches allows you to later decide which changes to include in the next version and which not to.
Branching strategies
There are many branching strategies available, but the three most used nowadays are the following:
- GitHub Flow
- GitFlow
- Release Flow
The following subsections will discuss...
