What is Base in Merge
It isn’t like I haven’t merged before, it’s more I never really really thought about it. When you doing a three way merge between branches, you have three files, and you’re trying to create a fourth:
- yours: in your branch
- theirs: in the source branch
- result: what you will create
- base: a common base
Because the merge tool picks these for you automatically (actually, it is the source control), I’ve never really thought about what is base, particularly when the branch history starts to get more complex. If you think about what you need to do, then the answer is relatively straightforward. The objective of merge is to take a set of changes in one branch and apply those changes in another branch. With that understanding, the meaning of base should be obvious. Base is the last version in the source branch from which the file was merged.
