In another tussle with Git, I performed the following sequence of commands:
- cd mach_star-rentzsch
- git fetch (from GitHub)
- cd ../mach_star-boredzo
- git fetch rentzsch (in this context, my git-remote alias for ../mach_star-rentzsch)
- git merge rentzsch/master
Step 5 failed with “Already up-to-date”.
What? I just fetched! I should have new commits to merge in!
Nope. For one thing, this output from step 4:
From ../mach_star-rentzsch * [new branch] master -> rentzsch/master
seems to mean “OK, here’s a new name for the master branch of that other repository, but we didn’t actually bring in any commits”.
The reason it didn’t bring in any commits is because git fetch apparently only fetches commits that are ancestors of the source repository’s current HEAD. In English: git fetch cares what you have checked out in the source repository.
It’s because I had fetched in step 2, and thereby not changed my HEAD, that step 4 did not see anything new to fetch. I don’t know why it works that way, or why they consider it useful.
Anyway, the “correct” sequence of steps is not much different: git pull, not fetch, in step 2 above. Or use Mercurial, which I’ve found makes a lot more sense in general.
It’s entirely possible that I’ve figured this out the wrong way, so take this entire explanation with a grain of salt.
