Question

I have a branch (mainbranch) which is recently derived from the master.

If a do a git pull origin otherbranch will that merge the branch otherbranch to the mainbranch derived from master?

Git merge can be used but curious to know what will the above statement do.

What i need is to merge otherbranch with main branch and megre is giving error

fatal: 'otherbranch' does not point to a commit

Answer 1

This command is equivalent to

git fetch origin otherbranch
git merge FETCH_HEAD

And will therefore:

1. Fetch the history of the remote branch otherbranch from remote origin (its head commit is temporarily saved in FETCH_HEAD).
2. Merge the history of origin/otherbranch (which is now in FETCH_HEAD) into the currently checked out branch.