Re: unable to checkout branches and proper procedure for creating a new branch based off of another one

[Thomas Anderson <zelnaga@gmail.com>]

Also, directories that are present in the "branch" branch aren't
present in the current working directory, despite my having switched
over.  "git checkout origin/branch" adds the missing directories but
"git checkout -b origin/branch" does not.  Which leaves me wondering
what the latter is doing.

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 10:32 PM, Thomas Anderson <zelnaga@gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess what I was trying to do was checkout a remote branch.  Of
> course, it's unclear to me what the difference between "git checkout
> origin/branch" and "git checkout -b origin/branch" is.  The latter
> creates a local branch and the former doesn't?  Does that mean that,
> with the former, changes I commit and subsequently push will get
> written to the remote default branch and not the remote "branch"
> branch?
>
> And how do I check that files in the current working directory are
> from the desired branch?  "git log" shows commits made to the default
> branch - not to the "default" branch, which doesn't give me much
> confidence...
>
> On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 9:41 PM, Thomas Anderson <zelnaga@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Say there's a Git repository with two branches: default (which is the
>> default branch) and branch.  I want to checkout branch and start
>> working on that but am unsure of how to do it.  Here are the commands
>> that I did:
>>
>> git clone git@github.com:username/repo.git
>> cd repo
>> git checkout branch
>>
>> But that gets me the following error:
>>
>> fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git
>>
>> I do "git branch" and here's what I see:
>>
>> * default
>>
>> Where's "branch"?
>>
>> And let's say I wanted to create my own branch based on "branch".
>> Let's say "branch-zelnaga".  How would I do that?  Do I just checkout
>> that branch, create a new branch while the current working directory
>> contains files from the desired branch and then push / commit as
>> appropriate?
>>
>