Terminologies - mkyg/hello-world GitHub Wiki
Repository
A repository is usually used to organize a single project. Repositories can contain folders and files, images, videos, spreadsheets, and data sets – anything your project needs.
We recommend including a README, or a file with information about your project. GitHub makes it easy to add one at the same time you create your new repository. It also offers other common options such as a license file.
Branching
Branching is the way to work on different versions of a repository at one time. By default your repository has one branch named master which is considered to be the definitive branch.
When you create a branch off of master branch, you’re making a copy, or snapshot, of master branch as it was at that point in time. If someone else made changes to the master branch while you were working on your branch, you could pull in those updates.
Here at GitHub, our developers, writers, and designers use branches for keeping bug fixes and feature work separate from our master (production) branch. When a change is ready, they merge their branch into master.
Commit
On GitHub, saved changes are called commits. Each commit has an associated commit message, which is a description explaining why a particular change was made.
Commit messages capture the history of your changes, so other contributors can understand what you’ve done and why.
Pull Request (Open and Merge a Pull Request)
Pull Requests are the heart of collaboration on GitHub. When you open a pull request, you’re proposing your changes and requesting that someone review and pull in your contribution and merge them into their branch.
Pull requests show diffs, or differences, of the content from both branches. The changes, additions, and subtractions are shown in green and red.
As soon as you make a commit, you can open a pull request and start a discussion, even before the code is finished.
By using GitHub’s @mention system in your pull request message, you can ask for feedback from specific people or teams, whether they’re down the hall or 10 time zones away.
Look over your changes in the diffs on the Compare page to make sure they’re what you want to submit, then create a Pull request. Finally, it’s time to bring your changes together – merging your branch off branch into the master branch.
You can even open pull requests in your own repository and merge them yourself.