branching-and-merging

I am using Git for my project and trying to follow best practice: I work on a topic branch When ready, I merge the topic branch into my dev branch using git merge --squash . This keeps my dev branch clean. Whenever the dev branch is stable and the team decides it's time for a release, we merge the dev branch into the master branch, without using squash, and tag that commit as a version release. This should keep our history, and using gitk, we can see where all of the commits come in. However, I want to be able to see only the commits applied to the master branch. I have tried: git log master

I am researching switching from starteam to git. Currently, in starteam, we use "floating views" with special names. These floating views basically work like aliases. Therefore, we can specify a specific alias to checkout from and we'll get the branch that we're currently model testing. How would this be done in git? This is basically how our branches are organized: These are all branches master (stable view) | - Branch 2012.05.01 | | - Project 1 | | - Project 2 | | - model [floating view / alias to Branch 2012.05.01] | | - Branch 2012.07.11 (these would also have various child views for

After merging a branch, do you delete it from the repository? However, it's a good practice or not? I usually create a lot of branches, since I don't want to break my current release, and I'd wish to delete them to keep things in order. However, if you work with Assembla or GitHub, your merge requests from old branches will be saved on the site, so if you delete them you'll get an error since it won't be able to fetch them... Usually how do manage that? There's no problem in deleting branches that have been merged in. All the commits are still available in the history, and even in the GitHub

I awoke this morning and looked at the commit history of one of my dev team's private repositories on BitBucket. I saw this: Anonymous committed fcde879 MERGE Merge branch 'develop' of https://bitbucket.org/abc/xyz into develop This is, uh, somewhat unusual. My guess was that this was pushed from a new machine that didn't have git configured properly. Still, I was not sure why it was doing this. On BitBucket, it shows two separate hashes as the commit parents, but it does not have the "view raw commit" option of other commits. I checked out that branch, pulled, and looked at the log manually.

I have two branches for my code. Lets say B1 and B2 . Code changes happen on both the branches parallely and we do a periodic merges (not everything, only necessary things) from B1 to B2 . However, this merge is done manually (for whatever reason) by copy pasting the code from one branch to another. Now, I want to make sure that all the necessary things are merged from B1 to B2 . Note that the files in B2 branch may contain additional changes other than coming from B1 . I tried using tfs merge /candidates ... command hoping that it will file comparison (may be using diff tool) and give the