spdr870/gitextensions — Issue #822: Pulling from remote branch A into local branch B creates phantom remote tracking branch B
Author: franmon
Created: 2012-03-03 05:37:28+00:00
State: open

Hi,

I am currently overviewing a corporate move from Source Safe to Git and we are using GitExtensions as our main UI. All of our users are new Git users, and are presently in their learning curve.

Some users mistakenly initiated a pull from the main remote development branch **A** while they had local branch **B** checked out, which is not present on the remote.

In GitExtensions command log, I see that the following command was used by GitExtensions:
`git pull --progress "origin" +refs/heads/A:refs/remotes/origin/B`

This ends up in creating a phantom remote tracking branch for **origin/B**, when no **B** branch ever existed on the remote. This confuses users quite a bit.

I would expect GitExtensions to rather use the following command:
`git pull --progress "origin" refs/heads/A`

This would do what I consider the more accurate behaviour of updating the local **B** branch with the updated content of **A**, but without creating the phantom branch.

Thanks,
François Charron