Ramifications of forgetting slash in “git merge origin/branch”

Question

Per this article, I\'ve tried to get myself in the habit of fetching and merging explicitly when updating my working copy. However, today I made a typo when issuing the comm

Answer 1

Let's start with the man page for the merge command:

   git merge [-n] [--stat] [--no-commit] [--squash]
           [-s <strategy>] [-X <strategy-option>]
           [--[no-]rerere-autoupdate] [-m <msg>] [<commit>...]

So, absent all the options, merge accepts a list of commits. If you're already on branch asdf and you type:

git merge asdf

...this is a no-op: merging a branch with itself means there's nothing to do. If you type this:

git merge origin

Then git will look for the default branch associated with the remote named origin. In the output of branch -a:

* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master

remotes/origin/HEAD points to the default branch, so:

git merge origin

is equivalent to:

git merge origin/master

So assuming that the default branch on your remote is master, when you typed:

git merge origin asdf

You got:

git merge origin/master

If the default branch was asdf, you got:

git merge origin/asdf