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Asked: 2026-05-11T02:07:20+00:00

I’m struggling to understand something about GIT. We’ve got a repository with a number

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I’m struggling to understand something about GIT.

We’ve got a repository with a number of branches in it. I can fetch a local copy of one of those branches (git checkout -b …), make some changes, then push them back. If I fail to tag the end of the branch, however, how do other users get the head of the branch? WHen they use git checkout to fetch the branch they get the code at the point of the branch — not the head of that branch.

What am I missing here?

EDIT: I came into this project late and was involved in the CVS to GIT conversion. I am assuming that the FOO_3_4_0001… tags all mark points along the branch kicked off with FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL. How can I check?

EDIT 2: Thanks to everyone who contributed answers. It turns out that tag FOO_3_4_0001 was not on the 3.4 branch and that’s what I was missing all along. I have already arranged the lynching party.

@ghoseb, didn’t work. I tried this:

16:19:29 (1) foo $ git checkout --track -b FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL origin/FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL Branch FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL set up to track remote branch refs/remotes/origin/FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL. Switched to a new branch 'FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL' 16:19:36 (1) foo $ git branch * FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL   master 16:19:39 (1) foo $ git pull remote: Counting objects: 68, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100remote: % (59/59), done. remote: Total 61 (delta 18), reused 0 (delta 0) Unpacking objects: 100% (61/61), done. From ssh://***    f0c5a5f..99f6c1e  master     -> origin/master Already up-to-date. 16:19:42 (1) foo $

At this point I checked for the change I made on this branch and it’s not there. If I check out the code tagged FOO_3_4_0001_RC5a my change is there.

Ok, more info for @Dustin and @mipadi.

When I run git branch -r, I see:

16:12:02 (1) foo $ git branch -r   origin/FOO_3_3_0001_BUILT_VF_BRANCH   origin/FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL   origin/FOO_3_5_0000_RC5   origin/FOO_3_5_0001_BRANCH   origin/HEAD   origin/master   origin/origin 16:12:05 (1) foo $

And if I look at the list of tags, I see, among other things:

16:12:05 (1) foo $ git tag -l FOO_3_4_0000_RC1 FOO_3_4_0000_RC2 FOO_3_4_0000_RC2b FOO_3_4_0000_RC3 FOO_3_4_0000_RC4 FOO_3_4_0000_RC4b FOO_3_4_0000_RC5 FOO_3_4_0000_RELEASE FOO_3_4_0000_TC1 FOO_3_4_0000_TC2 FOO_3_4_0001_RC2 FOO_3_4_0001_RC3 FOO_3_4_0001_RC4 FOO_3_4_0001_RC5 FOO_3_4_0001_RC5a FOO_3_4_0001_TC1 16:14:33 (1) foo $

The challenge I have is knowing what the latest code on the FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL branch is.

Now in this instance I happen to know that it’s FOO_3_4_0001_RC5a, but if I don’t (as will sometimes be the case for some of our developers) how do I check out the origin_FOO_3_4_0001_INITIAL branch know that I’ve got the very latest code on that branch?

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1 Answer

  1. It sounds like you’re doing the right thing. The name of a branch is simply a pointer to the latest commit on the branch. Are you sure you’re comming and pushing the changes back to the repo that everyone is pulling from? When you commit, you’re only committing to your local repo, so to get changes, collaborations must either (a) pull from your local repo, or (b) pull from some other accessible repo to which you have pushed your changes using git push.

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