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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Could you please explain it? Because I don't get it. Git's (current) behavior seems exactly backwards to me. It seems to me that what you want is for push to default to the current branch, but pull to default to all branches. i.e. I want push to mean "push what I'm currently working on" and pull to mean "sync my repo's state to be as close as possible to the remote repo's state".

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I think what you want in a pull is really just "git fetch", which will update all remote branches. In case you haven't realized this separation, try "git branch -av" to see that your local branch names are distinct from all the "remotes/*" branches. Also, if you have more than one remote repository location, not just origin, then "git remote update" will fetch them all.

Pull is basically the combination of fetch and merge into your local branch. Since there's always a chance for merging to fail and require fixup, it would be dangerous for pull to try all your local branches at once.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks. I guess I'm having a hard time getting out of the SVN mindset. I keep forgetting that there may not be any such thing as the remote repo, I can have different branches tracking different remote repos.

I always use "fetch" instead of "pull" for this reason--I want to update all my remote branches first, and then consider merging with local branches.

It seems that a lot of new git users default to "pull" and I'm not sure why. There must be some really popular tutorial out there that starts with pull.

"git pull" is the closest equivalent to what people are used to from many other source control systems where there is no concept of a local copy of remote branches.

Offtopic: I didn't know about `git branch -v`. Not something I needed enough to go looking for it, but nifty and good to know! Always learning more Git tricks :)

You can use the remote tracking branches if you don't want to make local commits and want them to be automatically updated by fetch. I.e.,

    git checkout origin/interesting-branch

Git will warn you that you're in "detached HEAD" state. When you are making local changes or want to return to where you were, you don't want "git fetch" to have side-effects. Note that you can update local branches without switching to them:

    git push . origin/branch-name:branch-name

will fast-forward you local 'branch-name' to match 'origin/branch-name'. It's basically the equivalent of

    git checkout branch-name
    git merge --ff-only origin/branch-name # or git pull origin branch-name
    git checkout the-last-branch-I-was-on

Each remote has its own namespace for a good reason.

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