New way of tracking remote branches -- question

I can see that the remote heads are where they are supposed to be
but no local tracking heads are created (by default).  I had
to do this manually.

Old behavior was that git did that for you automatically.
So I suppose this is another newbie protection.

What is the now the new, accepted way of tracking locally
remote branches? (other than creating them manually in
refs/heads?)

Thanks,
   Luben