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Branching means to seperate, ie: forking. You take what you can from the original project and move forward in your own direction.
Merging mean to join, when two projects have similar goals and fairly compatible code bases they can merge and work together on one project instead of two seperate ones.
BSD encourage 'branching' [forking] and GPL2 encourage 'merging' ?
So why there are thousands of Linux Distributions [forks] and only several BSD Distributions?
In what way BSD encourages forking? Because it is more free then GPL2?
GPL2 oriented projects love to fork, all those media players, beryl/compiz, window managers and many many many more.
Is it only me see that that way?
it's just the oposit. You create two branches of a project, by forking them. Like we have ProjectA and you don't like something, you create ProjectA+ that is a fork of my ProjectA.
Merging, would be when i take the modifications you did to ProjectA+ that i like, and merge them back to ProjectA, or viceversa.
versions evolve in a tree-like structure. however, unlike tree-ish structures, often one or more branches might blend together into a single branch.
a branch is an active line of development. there might be several of them.
to merge is to bring the contents of another branch into the current branch.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/glossary.html
RE: Branching vs. Merging




Member since:
2007-03-24
Could some one explain the difference between branching and merging before going on please?