Re: git pull question

I believe this is intentional.

A git pull always pulls into (at least) the currently checked out branch, in your case "master". By adding the <dst> param after the colon in the <refspec> you're saying to go ahead and fast-forward merge the local branch called "brA" if possible.

This is almost equivalent to saying:

git checkout brA git pull origin brA git checkout master git pull origin brA

assuming everything can be fast-forward merged.

Read the the portion of git-pull man entry regarding the <refspec> for a more thorough explanation: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-pull.html

However, I'm not entirely clear myself on the meaning of this note in the documentation:

Note You never do your own development on branches that appear on the right hand side of a <refspec> colon on Pull: lines; they are to be updated by git fetch. If you intend to do development derived from a remote branch B, have a Pull: line to track it (i.e. Pull: B:remote-B), and have a separate branch my-B to do your development on top of it. The latter is created by git branch my-B remote-B (or its equivalent git checkout -b my-B remote-B). Run git fetch to keep track of the progress of the remote side, and when you see something new on the remote branch, merge it into your development branch with git pull . remote-B, while you are on my-B branch.