The "master" branch that was created at the time you cloned is a copy
of the HEAD in the repository that you cloned from. That repository
may also have had other branches, though, and your local repository
-keeps branches which track each of those remote branches, which you
+keeps branches which track each of those remote branches, called
+remote-tracking branches, which you
can view using the "-r" option to linkgit:git-branch[1]:
------------------------------------------------
origin/todo
------------------------------------------------
-You cannot check out these remote-tracking branches, but you can
-examine them on a branch of your own, just as you would a tag:
+In this example, "origin" is called a remote repository, or "remote"
+for short. The branches of this repository are called "remote
+branches" from our point of view. The remote-tracking branches listed
+above were created based on the remote branches at clone time and will
+be updated by "git fetch" (hence "git pull") and "git push". See
+<<Updating-a-repository-With-git-fetch>> for details.
+
+You might want to build on one of these remote-tracking branches
+on a branch of your own, just as you would for a tag:
------------------------------------------------
$ git checkout -b my-todo-copy origin/todo
------------------------------------------------
+You can also check out "origin/todo" directly to examine it or
+write a one-off patch. See <<detached-head,detached head>>.
+
Note that the name "origin" is just the name that git uses by default
to refer to the repository that you cloned from.
origin/master
-------------------------------------------------
-If you run "git fetch <remote>" later, the tracking branches for the
+If you run "git fetch <remote>" later, the remote-tracking branches for the
named <remote> will be updated.
If you examine the file .git/config, you will see that git has added
$ git pull origin master
-------------------------------------------------
-In fact, if you have "master" checked out, then by default "git pull"
-merges from the HEAD branch of the origin repository. So often you can
+In fact, if you have "master" checked out, then this branch has been
+configured by "git clone" to get changes from the HEAD branch of the
+origin repository. So often you can
accomplish the above with just a simple
-------------------------------------------------
$ git pull
-------------------------------------------------
-More generally, a branch that is created from a remote branch will pull
+This command will fetch changes from the remote branches to your
+remote-tracking branches `origin/*`, and merge the default branch into
+the current branch.
+
+More generally, a branch that is created from a remote-tracking branch
+will pull
by default from that branch. See the descriptions of the
branch.<name>.remote and branch.<name>.merge options in
linkgit:git-config[1], and the discussion of the `--track` option in
$ cd work
-------------------------------------------------
-Linus's tree will be stored in the remote branch named origin/master,
+Linus's tree will be stored in the remote-tracking branch named origin/master,
and can be updated using linkgit:git-fetch[1]; you can track other
public trees using linkgit:git-remote[1] to set up a "remote" and
linkgit:git-fetch[1] to keep them up-to-date; see
may be lost, as we saw in the previous section.
[[remote-branch-configuration]]
-Configuring remote branches
----------------------------
+Configuring remote-tracking branches
+------------------------------------
We saw above that "origin" is just a shortcut to refer to the
repository that you originally cloned from. This information is