Question

I have a remote tracking branch tracked locally in my local repository using ‘git branch -b branch-name origin/branch-name’.
My remote branch is test2/test2 (origin/branch-name) which is being tracked locally as test2.

The origin is also named test2.
I haven’t checked-out my local tracking branch test2.

When i do a ‘git pull origin remote-branch:local-tracked-branch’ i get this error

[test2]$ git pull test2 test2:test2
From /gitvobs/git_bare/test2
! [rejected] test2 -> test2 (non fast forward)

Whereas when i checkout my local tracking branch test2
and do pull ‘git pull origin local-tracked-branch’ i don’t get the error
and i do a pull using ‘git pull test2 test2’

From /gitvobs/git_bare/test2
* branch test2 -> FETCH_HEAD
Auto-merging a.txt
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

i know that adding a + (git pull test2 +test2:test2) would help but it overwrites local changes.

So how do i know which of my local branches are created by me locally using ‘git branch new-branch-name’ or tracked locally from remote branches using git branch -b branch-name origin/branch-name’?

Answer 1

Independently of the list of tracked branched (which you can see with git config -l), a “non-fast-forward” message means cannot merge the remote branch (i.e. the local copy of the fetched commit of the remote branch) in your branch because:

• your branch has commits of its own
• the remote branch has new commits since the last pull

so:

  --last pull
  |
  v
x-x-x-x-x <--test2
  \
   -y-y-y <-- test2/test2

Whereas this would have been a fast-forward merge

  --last pull
  |
  v
x-x <--test2
  \
   -y-y-y <-- test2/test2

So:

git checkout test2
git fetch test2 test2 
git merge test2/test2
#fix conflicts
git commit

And please, do call your remote repo any other name than test2. That is way too many test2 here 😉

---

Now for the list of remote branches tracked in your local repo:

git config --get-regexp branch..*