Re: unable to checkout branches and proper procedure for creating a new branch based off of another one

I guess what I was trying to do was checkout a remote branch.  Of
course, it's unclear to me what the difference between "git checkout
origin/branch" and "git checkout -b origin/branch" is.  The latter
creates a local branch and the former doesn't?  Does that mean that,
with the former, changes I commit and subsequently push will get
written to the remote default branch and not the remote "branch"
branch?

And how do I check that files in the current working directory are
from the desired branch?  "git log" shows commits made to the default
branch - not to the "default" branch, which doesn't give me much
confidence...

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 9:41 PM, Thomas Anderson [off-list ref] wrote:

Say there's a Git repository with two branches: default (which is the
default branch) and branch.  I want to checkout branch and start
working on that but am unsure of how to do it.  Here are the commands
that I did:

git clone git@github.com:username/repo.git
cd repo
git checkout branch

But that gets me the following error:

fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

I do "git branch" and here's what I see:

* default

Where's "branch"?

And let's say I wanted to create my own branch based on "branch".
Let's say "branch-zelnaga".  How would I do that?  Do I just checkout
that branch, create a new branch while the current working directory
contains files from the desired branch and then push / commit as
appropriate?