How git finds conflicts

As software development becomes increasingly complex, collaborative work becomes more critical. In order to collaborate efficiently and orderly, developers use version control tools, and Git is one of them. However, conflicts may occur when multiple people modify the same code at the same time. This article explains how Git detects conflicts and how to resolve them.

What is Git conflict

When using Git for collaborative development, if multiple developers make modifications in the same location of the same code file, Git will treat such a situation as Code conflict. For example, if two developers on a team add code to the same line in the same code file, Git will treat the modification as a conflict because Git doesn't know which change to save the conflicting file.

How Git detects conflicts

Git detects conflicts by comparing the differences between two branches. When one developer's branch (branch A) and another developer's branch (branch B) both modify the same code file, Git will discover this problem when merging the branches. At this point, Git needs to compare the differences between the code base (master branch) on the version control server and the developer's working branches (branch A and branch B) to determine that a code conflict has occurred. In Git, the following situation occurs when merging branches:

• If the same line is modified in branch A and branch B, Git will find the conflict during the merge branch process and alert the development of the conflict personnel, they handle it.
• If branch A or branch B modified different parts of the code file, Git will try to merge the changes of the two branches. If Git finds that the code modified by two branches conflicts, Git will trigger a code conflict alert during the merge process, and we need to resolve the conflict manually.

In both cases, Git will save the discovered conflict information in the information of the current branch, so that developers can use this information when resolving conflicts.

How to resolve Git conflicts

When Git finds a conflict, it will ask developers to resolve the conflict through manual intervention. Git provides many tools and commands to help developers resolve conflicts.

Use the diff command to view the differences

When Git finds a code conflict, it generates a file with a conflict mark. This file shows different diffs of conflicting code pulled from two different branches. We can use the diff command to view code conflicts. The command is:

$ git diff [conflicted_file]

This command will display the code conflict function and display the difference part.

Use mergetool to resolve conflicts

Git also provides the Mergetool tool, which can be used to resolve conflicts visually. Mergetool opens conflict files and provides a three-way merge, which also allows developers to take the lead in making decisions to resolve code conflicts. In Linux systems, we can start Mergetool through the following command:

$ git mergetool

Use the editor to manually resolve conflicts

The final format of the Git conflict file is as follows:

<<<<<<< HEAD                              # 当前分支改动
Hello World!
=======
Bonjour tout le monde!                 # 合并的另一个分支修改
>>>>>>> branchA

In In this case, the developer needs to manually modify the file to resolve the conflict. Usually, you can use a text editor to open the file containing the conflict and resolve the conflict manually; after resolving all conflicts, we can use the following command to commit the changes to the Git repository:

$ git add [resolved_file]             # 将已经解决的文件加入到 Git 索引
$ git commit -m 'Resolve conflicts'   # 提交解决后的修改，写明解决冲突的过程

In short, Git is A powerful and stable version control tool, but conflicts may occur when multiple people collaborate on development. In order to resolve these conflicts, we need to learn to use the tools and commands provided by Git to help developers resolve conflicts. By being familiar with and understanding how Git conflicts are handled, we can easily resolve conflicts and work more efficiently and orderly in collaborative work.

The above is the detailed content of How git finds conflicts. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!