Understanding Git

When I started using Git, I came from using Subversion which is on the other end for the VCS spectrum (centralised vs distributed). It took me a while to properly understand Git due to how different it's from Subversion. However, I found an easy way to understand how Git worked was to look at it from the perspective of how objects and references (or pointers) work in your favourite programming language.

Git linked list example

A single commit in Git is just an object which contains a reference to it's parent commit object. This forms a series of interconnecting linked lists, which make up the branches in Git. In fact, a branch in Git is really just a reference to a single commit object, which is usually located at the end of one of these linked lists (but doesn't have to be). And a tag is just a simple object that contains a reference to a commit object. A lot of these references also work exactly as you'd expect, for example you can easily change an existing branch to point to ANY existing commit object.

This may be a bit of a simplification of how Git works in reality, but it helped me to picture in my mind how a Git repository fits together, and made it a lot easier for me to understand advanced Git concepts and techniques.

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