fetch and pull

I've gotten the hang of git well enough to pretty much bang on it until I achieve what I wanted to happen, though maybe trying a few things and recovering from mistakes or taking the long way around.

Now I'm putting together a cookbook for our team, to allow use of topic branches rather than treating it simply as a faster SourceSafe.

I want to advocate running

	git fetch

as being a safe thing to do at any time, just to refresh your view of the origin and not mess up any of your local labels. That is, you can see the difference between the local dev and the origin/dev.

So, after inspecting the changes, how do you fast-forward your local dev to sync up with origin/dev?

I'm worried that

	git pull origin dev

will try to merge into the current head. The documentation indicates "The remote ref that matches <src> is fetched, and if <dst> is not empty string, the local ref that matches it is fast forwarded using <src>." which is what I want, but it does NOT say that the normal behavior of merging origin/dev into the =current= HEAD, if it happens to not be the local dev.

So, does it indeed suppress that behavior if you give it an explicit destination? Or will I have to checkout dev first before doing the pull, to prevent strange things from happening? Hmm, or perhaps I should be using merge, not pull? After all, pull is really just a wrapper around fetch and then merge, right? So is it OK to call merge when I really want to fast-forward, and is there an option to give an error if it isn't ff?

--John (sorry about the footer; it's not my idea)

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