Why does git-pull manpage say “You never do your own development on branches that appear on the right hand side of a colon on Pull: lines”?

Question

The manpage for git pull, below \"Options related to fetching\" says

You never do your own development on branches that appear on the right hand side

Answer 1

Your workflow is correct.

Have a look inside your .git directory at the root of your project, examine the config file and you should see something like

[remote "origin"]
    url = git@bitbucket.org:something/projectname.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

these lines are consulted when you type git fetch origin.

You can see that actually the right-hand-side of the pull/fetch is actually something that contains remotes/origin. What they are saying is do not edit the remote tracking branch.

By typing

git checkout -b un-3437 origin/un-3437

you are creating a local branch that tracks the "locally stored remote tracking branch". When git status says you are ahead or behind by X commits, it is comparing un-3437 to remotes/origin/un-3437.