mysterious vanishing branches in git

Question

Here are some git actions I performed. As you can see, I made a new branch, modified my files, and then committed the changes. After changing back to another branch, hoping

Answer 1

for some reason, you're getting a detach head situation. I'm not entirely sure how that is caused in a regular git repo, but i've encountered it using git svn (and came up with my own solution here). It might be that the aren't --tracking the upstream repo when you create a new branch. Usually when you get a detached head, when you do a git branch, you will see (asterisk) (no branch) (don't know how to do a literal asterisk with markdown)