how to make "pull" always pulling the matching branch?

Hello,

until some time ago,

git pull remote-repo

worked like that; alright, at some time warning messages appeared, so I used

git pull remote-repo master

I attempted several times to understand the strange message issued by pull: -------------------- You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you want to merge with, and 'branch.master.merge' in your configuration file does not tell me either. Please specify which branch you want to merge on the command line and try again (e.g. 'git pull <repository> <refspec>'). See git-pull(1) for details.

If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to configure the following variables in your configuration file:

    branch.master.remote = <nickname>
    branch.master.merge = <remote-ref>
    remote.<nickname>.url = <url>
    remote.<nickname>.fetch = <refspec>

See git-config(1) for details. -------------------- but neither do I understand what could be meant here, nor do I understand the details of git-pull or git-config w.r.t. this issue (the above doesn't give a hint about the meaning of the possible actions).

So well, now the same thing happened with "git push", but here the message actually is better and tells the reader what to do (nearly); so I specified "matching" for the config-variable push.default, and that's fine.

I was hoping that there would also be a pull.default, which I could set to matching, but apparently there is nothing like that? How do I achieve this?

It seems rather sensible to me to have this as the default: just pull a matching branch, not more, not less --- what else could/should it be if nothing else is specified?

Oliver

P.S. I'm using version 1.6.3.