Question

What are the Git commands to do the following workflow?

Scenario

I cloned from a repository and did some commits of my own to my local repository. In the meantime, my colleagues made commits to the remote repository. Now, I want to:

1. Check whether there are any new
   commits from other people on the
   remote repository, i.e. origin?

2. Say there were three new commits on the
   remote repository since my last
   pull, I would like to diff the
   remote repository’s commits, i.e.
   HEAD~3 with HEAD~2, HEAD~2 with
   HEAD~1 and HEAD~1 with HEAD.

3. After knowing what changed remotely,
   I want to get the latest commits
   from the others.

My findings so far

For step 2: I know the caret notation HEAD^, HEAD^^ etc. and the tilde notation HEAD~2, HEAD~3, etc.

For step 3: That is, I guess, just a git pull.

Answer 1

You could git fetch origin to update the remote branch in your repository to point to the latest version. For a diff against the remote:

git diff origin/master

Yes, you can use caret notation as well.

If you want to accept the remote changes:

git merge origin/master