title: git: merge two branches: what direction?
body: <p>We have the following situation:</p>
  
  <pre><code>             A --- B --- C --- ... --- iphone
             /
    ... --- last-working --- ... --- master
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Between last-working and iPhone, 32 commits were made. Between last-working and master, <em>a lot</em> of commits were made.</p>
  
  <p>What I want now is a new branch where I have iphone and current master merged together. And at some later time, this should be merged into the master.</p>
  
  <p>First, I planned to do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>git checkout iphone -b iphone31
  git merge master
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But then I thought, if it would be better to do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>git checkout master -b iphone31
  git merge iphone
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now I am wondering. <strong>What would be the difference in the result?</strong> Would the merge behave different?</p>
  
  <p>I already tried both and as I have expected, I got <em>many</em> conflicts because iphone is really old compared to master. Now I wonder about the easiest way to merge them.</p>
  
  <p>Maybe even starting with master and merging each single commit of iphone into it would be easier? Like doing this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>git checkout master -b iphone31
  git merge A
  git merge B
  git merge C
  ...
  git merge iphone
  </code></pre>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>At the very end, when this merge is done (i.e. all conflicts are resolved and it is working), I want to do this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>git checkout master
  git merge iphone31
  </code></pre>