Creating a new commit

Before starting to develop with Git, you should introduce yourself with a name and an e-mail, as shown in Chapter 1, Git Basics in Practice. This information will be used to identify your work, either as an author or as a committer. The setup can be global for all your repositories (with git config --global, or by editing the ~/.gitconfig file directly), or local to a repository (with git config, or by editing .git/config). The per-repository configuration overrides the per-user one (you will learn more about it in Chapter 10, Customizing and Extending Git). You might want to use your company e-mail for work repositories, but your own non-work e-mail for public repositories you work on.

A relevant fragment of the appropriate config file could look similar to this:

[user]
  name = Joe R. Hacker
  email = [e-mail]

Fig 1. The graph of revisions (the DAG) for a starting point of an example project, before creating a new commit. The current branch is master, and its...