Question

I have a repo setup, and am just learning about how branches work. Right now I have two branches on the remote repo:
master
dev

It’s a little bit confusing to have the same word checkout between git and svn, since in svn it means pull all the files, but in git it only means switch where the commits will go.

I tried to git clone before I created the dev branch, but when I tried to push from my local machine it gave me a message saying it wouldn’t do it due to the index and tree getting messed up if I did it.

I want to work on dev on my local machine, and possibly diff and compare that to the master branch. git clone didn’t pull down the dev branch, only the master one. How should I go about doing this?

Answer 1

Actually, git clone did fetch the master branch and check it out. You can now checkout the dev branch using git checkout --track -b dev origin/dev (checkout the branch dev from the remote origin, and create a new (local) branch called dev that tracks it).