Question

Sometimes I want to be able to pull from a repo (via clone). But when I do that and then change to a local branch to pull-in a remote branch, git assumes I want to take the main branch and integrate it. How do I avoid this? I’m sure I can achieve what I want by a different series of actions/commands.

I’d say I normally run into this when I want to work on a specific branch on a secondary machine.

update:
I run the following commands on a secondary machine where I only want to work on the experiment branch

git clone http://somewhere.com/something.git    
git branch experiment    
git checkout experiment   
git pull origin experiement    

Answer 1

Each branch needs to point at some commit. If you don’t specify anything, git branch points the new branch at at the same commit as HEAD.

You want the branch to point at origin/experiment instead:

git clone http://somewhere.com/something.git
cd something
git branch experiment origin/experiment
git checkout experiment

or…

git clone http://somewhere.com/something.git
cd something
git checkout -b experiment origin/experiment

or, since git is smart enough to know what you’re trying to do in this case…

git clone http://somewhere.com/something.git
cd something
git checkout experiment

All of these will do the same thing (create the new branch pointing at origin/experiment). They’ll also set the branch up to track origin/experiment, so push and pull will be to and from that remote branch.