Question

What is the difference between doing (after mkdir repo and cd repo):

git init
git remote add origin git://github.com/cmcculloh/repo.git
git fetch --all
git pull origin master

and

git clone git://github.com/cmcculloh/repo.git

I mean, obviously one is shorter, but other than that are they basically doing the same thing?

Answer 1

They’re basically the same, except clone will setup additional remote tracking branches, not just master. Check out the man page:

Clones a repository into a newly created directory, creates remote-tracking branches for each branch in the cloned repository (visible using git branch -r), and creates and checks out an initial branch that is forked from the cloned repository’s currently active branch.