Re: Branches & directories

[Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 13:42 -0700, Hilco Wijbenga
<hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com> wrote:
> Isn't a branch simply a way to track changes separately?

Well, what does that mean, really? You can certainly use branches to
help you achieve that goal.

In git usage, a `branch' is just a human-readable name for any given
commit object; it points to a commit object, and you can change to
which commit it points. Furthermore, to help you work with commit
lineages, some of the git machinery updates these branches (or
`pointers', if you like) automatically (for instance, when you make a
new commit object with `git commit', then the `current branch' is
updated to point to the newly created commit object).

Of course, 2 different branches may be used to point to the same commit object.

You should really think of your repository as a giant web of commit
objects (or, more technically, as a directed acyclic graph where each
node is a commit object); a commit object can point 'backwards'
towards its parent commit objects. A branch (like `master') just
points to one of these commit objects at any given time (that is, a
branch just gives a nice human-readable label by which to reference
one of these commit objects at any given time).

See here too:

  http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2350536&cid=36903136