Developing with Git

This chapter will describe how to create new revisions and new lines of development (new branches) with Git.

Here, we will focus on committing one’s own work on the solo development. The description of working as one of the contributors is left for Chapter 6, Collaborative Development with Git, while Chapter 9, Merging Changes Together, will show how to join created lines of development and how Git can help in maintainer duties.

This chapter will introduce the very important Git concept of the staging area (also called the index), while more advanced techniques for manipulating it will be described in Chapter 3, Managing Your Worktrees. It will also explain, in detail, the idea of a detached HEAD — that is, an anonymous, unnamed branch. Here, you can also find how Git describes differences between two versions of the project, or changes to the project, including a detailed description of the so-called extended unified diff format.

The following...