Re: "Not currently on any branch"

Timothy Washington [off-list ref] writes:

Thanks for all the responses so far. But if you take a look at my repo
(http://repo.or.cz/w/Bookkeeping.git), at the bottom of the page,
there's clearly a 'ui-integration' branch. But if I try to go to my
ui-integration branch, I get the message below. So I'm just clueless as
to where it went. If use the -b option, then I'll create a new
branch. But I don't want that. I want to keep all the data that was in
my original 'ui-integration' branch.

[timothyw] ~/Projects/Bookkeeping.4 $ git checkout ui-integration
error: pathspec 'ui-integration' did not match any file(s) known to git.

I do not think it has anything to do with "Not currently on any branch",
but judging from this

[remote "origin"]
    url = http://repo.or.cz/r/Bookkeeping.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

one possibility to see the above error message is to do this:

    $ git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/Bookkeeping.git
    $ cd Bookkeeping
    $ git checkout ui-integration
    error: pathspec 'ui-integration' did not match any file(s) known to git.

In a clone, your local branch namespace is not cluttered with all the
different branches your upstream repository has.  To wit:

    $ git branch
    * master
    $ git branch -a
    * master
      remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
      remotes/origin/master
      remotes/origin/ui-integration

If you want to further work on the ui-integration topic, you would do
something like:

    $ git checkout -b ui-integration origin/ui-integration
    Branch ui-integration set up to track remote branch ui-integration from origin.
    Switched to a new branch 'ui-integration'
    $ git branch
      master
    * ui-integration

On the other hand, if you are not interested in working on that topic but
just want to look at it, e.g. merge it to your master:

    $ git branch
    * master
    $ git merge origin/ui-integration

without creating a local ui-integration branch at all (iow, skip that
"checkout -b" step above altogether).