24 Glossary terms

Terms and definitions

Branch: A pointer to a particular commit, representing an independent line of development in a project Commit ID: An identifier next to the word commit in the log Fast-forward merge: A merge when all the commits in the checked out branch are also in the branch that’s being merged Three-way merge: A merge when the snapshots at the two branch tips with the most recent common ancestor, the commit before the divergence Head: This points to the top of the branch that is being used Master: The default branch that Git creates for when a new repository initialized, commonly used to place the approved pieces of a project Merge conflict: This occurs when the changes are made on the same part of the same file, and Git won’t know how to merge those changes Rollback: The act of reverting changes made to software to a previous state