fast forward a branch from another

> Often times I get into a situation where I have a "development" branch
> that gets ahead of say a "stable" branch.
> When I am ready to call the development branch stable this is what I do.
> 
> $ git checkout stable
> $ git merge development
> $ git checkout development
> 
> The problem here is that the act of going backwards (via checking out
> stable) really messes up my IDE and or Text editors.
> Is there any way to do this without switching branches, which modifies
> my working directory, which messes up my IDE?

> Eric Frederich venit, vidit, dixit 12.05.2011 16:40:
>> Often times I get into a situation where I have a "development" branch
>> that gets ahead of say a "stable" branch.
>> When I am ready to call the development branch stable this is what I do.
>>
>> $ git checkout stable
>> $ git merge development
>> $ git checkout development
>>
>> The problem here is that the act of going backwards (via checking out
>> stable) really messes up my IDE and or Text editors.
>> Is there any way to do this without switching branches, which modifies
>> my working directory, which messes up my IDE?
> 
> I assume this is a ff-situation, i.e. stable is fully contained in
> developement? then you can reset branch stable like this:
> 
> test 0 -eq $(git rev-list  --count ^development stable) && git branch -f
> stable development
> 
> (I thought you could git rev-list --quiet but I'm too dumb :|)

> Often times I get into a situation where I have a "development" branch
> that gets ahead of say a "stable" branch.
> When I am ready to call the development branch stable this is what I do.
>
> $ git checkout stable
> $ git merge development
> $ git checkout development

> [...]
> Instead of switching to "stable", while still on the development, you
> could do
>
> 	$ git push . HEAD:stable
>
> which would succeed only when you are purely ahead of stable (otherwise it
> will fail as you are not forcing).
>

> Phil Hord <hordp@cisco.com> writes:
>
>> I don't see this feature listed in the git push [REMOTES] section.  Is
>> it documented somewhere else?
> Both "git help push" and "git help pull" will tell you in the "Git URLs"
> section that a local file path is a way to name a repository.  Therefore,
> you can say "git ls-remote $(pwd)" to list the the refs from the current
> repository. If you are in git.git directory, "git ls-remote ../git.git"
> does the same thing, so does "git ls-remote .".
>
> These are merely specializations of more general "git push $path $refspec"
> and nothing noteworthy.