Merging process in Git

A Fast forward merge

• A fast-forward merge is possible when there are no further commit created in the receiving branch after the branch being merged was created. eg a feature branch

• It just move the main branch pointer to the last commit in the feature_branch

Fast-forward Merging process

1. Create a new branch called feature-1 from the main branch.
2. Make changes in the new branch and commit them.
3. Checkout the main branch, in this case which will be the receiving branch.
4. Merge the feature branch into the current receiving branch

git checkout -b feature-1

git commit -a -m "changes in  the feature 1 branch"

git checkout main

git merge feature-1

A three-way merge process

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• Happens when there are new commit in the receiving since the current branch was created.

• A new merge commit is created which is the parent of the last two commits being merge

Three way merging process

During a three way merge-process, if the same file was edited in both branches, a merge conflict will happen. To resolve the conflict manually, you can use an editor/; lke nano and VScode.

• You can decide:

  1. Keep both changes you made
  2. Accept changes from the incoming branch in this case the merge-conflict branch
  3. You can also decide to keep the changes in the receiving branch

• A merge conflict may happen during three-way merge process, when you make changes to to the same file before the merge commit is created

• Git will ask you to resolve all the conflict before it proceeds with the merge of the two branches