git pull merges automatically

Question

I've a master branch and a feature_swap branch. I want to continue working on these two branches in parallel. I did some change on master and then committed. I wanted to apply some algorithm changes of master to feature_swap branch and see how that version works. So I did

git pull origin feature_swap

and got this message

 * branch            feature_swap -> FETCH_HEAD
Auto-merging collator.h
Merge made by recursive.

I don't want to merge. Rather I just want to put some selected changes that I applied on master to feature_swap (maybe by copy pasting). And if that fits my expectation, I'll make another commit to that branch with those changes. Which I again want paralally.

I'm afraid, I'vent done a git push yet. I can see merge branch 'feature_swap' in git log. What I need to do now to restore the state ?

Answer 1

Considering the definition of git pull is git fetch && git merge, the merge isn't unexpected.

You might want to to do git rebase master instead, which will reapply the commits in master onto feature_swap. Combined with cherry-pick you can specify the commits you want.

To fetch from the remote, simply use git fetch which will download the commits from the remote but doesn't apply them.