Re: Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged

Hilco Wijbenga [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I meant something else than Junio hinted at.  Saying

  git fetch origin master
  # or by extension
  git pull origin master

does not update the origin/* namespace, not even origin/master.  All
fetching happens only into FETCH_HEAD.  This leads to confusion such as
yours because origin/master and thus the upstream tracking displays will
not know about the change.

I'll say. Now I'm really confused.

If what you say is true then what is updating origin/master? I've been
using "git pull" daily for over a year and origin/master is definitely
getting updated (at least according to gitk).

Now it is really the time for you to go back to "git fetch --help"
and read up on refspecs.

With

    $ git fetch origin

you are not telling "fetch" what to fetch, so it goes to your .git/config
and finds remote.origin section to find what refspec to use.  They
would say something like

	[remote "origin"]
        	url = ...
                fetch = refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

meaning (see the manual) "fetch all the branches there, store them
with the corresponding name under  refs/remotes/origin".

With

    $ git fetch origin master

you are overiding the refspec in .git/config and explicitly saying
"I want to fetch the master branch, but do not want to update
anything with it".  It is a short-hand for

    $ git fetch origin refs/heads/master

which in turn is a short-hand for

    $ git fetch origin refs/heads/master:

If you wanted to update the tracking ref, you would use a refspec
with non-empty strings on the both sides of colon, i.e.

    $ git fetch origin master:refs/remotes/origin/master