Types and purposes of branches

A branch in a version control system is a active parallel line of development. They are useful, as we will see, to isolate and separate different types of work. For example, branches can be used to prevent your current work on a feature in progress from interfering with the management of bug fixes.

A single Git repository can have an arbitrary number of branches. Moreover, with a distributed version control system, such as Git, there could be many repositories (forks) for a single project, some public and some private; each repository will have its own local branches.

Before examining how the collaboration between repositories looks like at the branch level, we need to know what types of branches we would encounter in local and remote repositories. Let's now talk about how these branches are used and examine why people would want to use multiple branches in a single repository.

Note

A bit of history: a note on the evolution of branch management

Early distributed...