I'm working on a project with some people who have never used git before. Not knowing the capabilities of git, they created two version of the project: development and production. These two versions are both present in the current environment.

To complicate things further, this other user created these folders in addition to the old development folder. So the project directory looks like this

/root
  /proj         (old dev folder with my own code in it)
  /dev_proj     (new folder which I would like to merge /prod with)
  /prod_proj       (production code)

So what I'd like to do is merge the work that I've done in /proj with the work in the /dev_proj. Is there a way to do this with git?

I've thought about creating a branch, copying all the files from /proj to /dev_proj and merging that branch with master. Would this work?

Thanks and if I could clarify something let me know.