xala.txt

Remotes
Now lets take a look at remotes.
Remotes are basically pointers to branches in other peoples copies of the same repository,
often on other computers.
If you got your repository by cloning it,
rather than initializing it,
you should have a remote branch of where you copied it from automatically added as origin by default.
Which means the tree that was checked out during your initial clone would be referenced as origin/master,
which means “the master branch of the origin remote.”
Lets say you clone someone’s repository and make a few changes.
You would have two references,
one to origin/master which points to where the master branch was on the person’s repository you cloned from when you did so,
and a master branch that points the most recent local commit.
Now let’s say you run a fetch.
A fetch pulls all the refs and objects that you don’t already have from the remote repository you specify.
By default, it is origin, but you can name your remotes anything, and you can have more than one.
Suppose we fetch from the repository that we originally cloned from and they had been doing some work.
They have now committed a few times on their master branch,
but they also branched off at one point to try an idea,
and they named the branch idea locally,
then pushed that branch.
We now have access to those changes as origin/idea.
We look at the idea branch and like where they’re going with it,
but we also want the changes they’ve made on their master branch,
so we do a 3-way merge of their two branches and our master.
We don’t know how well this is going to work, so we make a tryidea branch first and then do the merge there.
Now we can run our tests and merge everything back into our master branch if we want.
Then we can tell our friend we cloned from to fetch from our repository,
where we’ve merged their two branches for them and integrated some of our changes as well.
They can choose to accept or reject that patch.