Question

Developer A is working on branch 2012A

I branch 2012A, and create branch 2012B

I want all the new changes from 2012A, so I simply want to merge them into 2012B and carry on working.

Does this look ok as a workflow?

git checkout 2012A (switch to 2012A)
git pull origin 2012A (update 2012A)
git checkout 2012B (switch to 2012B)

git merge 2012A (merge in 2012A)
git commit -m 'commiting changes from 2012A' (commit changes from 2012A in 2012B)

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

It should work, however you could do it in a simpler way:

directly from branch 2012B:

git fetch origin
git merge origin/2012A

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Note that you are not required to have a local branch for 2012A: if have a repository in your remotes (here your remote is origin) you usually carry the snapshots of the remote branches. You can see them by running:

git branch -a

(See the remotes/... entries of the output)

The git fetch command updates the snapshots, so git fetch origin updates your local images of the remote branches in origin, and git merge origin/2012A merges such image into the current branch (i.e. applies the patches of origin/2012A on 2012B).

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Suggested article:
http://longair.net/blog/2009/04/16/git-fetch-and-merge/