Merge

The act of promotion of changes by merging them with the existing state.

Imagine you have master branch and two branches feature1 and feature2.

Both branches were created from master at the same time and do not contain any changes yet.

Because branch is basically a pointer to commit, the initial state looks like this:


o "Initial commit" [master] [feature1] [feature2]

Then you commit some changes to feature1:


o "New feature 1"  [feature 1]
|                  
o "Initial commit" [master] [feature2]

Then you merge the changes from feature1 to master, modifying the repository to this:


o "New feature 1"  [master] [feature1]
|
o "Initial commit" [feature2]