From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:01:52 GMT
Subject: Re: "git pull . <branch>" versus "git merge <branch>"
Message-ID: <7v3anjbmov.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <484F2174.9020508@keyaccess.nl>

Rene Herman <rene.herman@keyaccess.nl> writes:

> Good day.
>
> The manpages seem to be making somewhat of a point of mentioning "git
> pull . <branch>" as the way to merge a local branch into the current
> one but a simple "git merge <branch>" seems to work well. Is there a
> difference?

There isn't any.

"git pull . this_branch" is just a natural and logical consequence that
you can fetch and merge a branch B from remote U with "git pull $U $B".

"git merge that_branch" exists and useful because people on average merge
local branches more than they fetch and merge from remote repository.