Transplant branch from another repository

Hi,

Say, I have two repositories A and B (local, independent, but similar
- they are for content tracking and not collaboration purposes). A has
a branch 'a', which I want to have in B. What I mean is that I'd like
to have the sequence of changes in the branch 'a' to be present in B,
thus creating an independent branch 'b' in B.

Is there any way to achieve this? One thing that I could think of is to use 'format-patch' to generate the list of patch files from A. But I don't see how to convert those patches to a sequence of commits in repo B. I could do a 'git apply patches/*' but then all patches collapse to one single commit. If format-patch is a/the way, could somebody tell me how to get this done? Or are there any alternatives?

FWIW: I'm running Git under Cygwin, and sendmail isn't configured.

Thanks Jeenu