Git- Tracking remote branches

Question

I am a Mercurial user, and I am confused about the behaviour of remote branches. I have a remote branch origin/dev, and I want to replicate it on a local branche dev. What I would like is that:

• whenever I git pull, changes to origin/dev are merged into dev
• whenever I git push, changes to dev are merged into origin/dev

So I created a tracking branch with

git branch --track dev origin/dev

which, to the best of my knowledge, should do exactly what I need.

Still, I was working on a feature branch and issued a git pull. When I later issued git checkout dev I received the puzzling message

Your branch is behind 'origin/master_dev' by 2 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.

So it seems that my local branch was not updated after all. Is there a way to have the branch updated to the remote one whenever I pull and I am not currently in that branch? If not, am I correct that git merge (without any arguments) on branch dev is enough to restore the situation?

Answer 1

The command git pull fetches updates from all remote branches (i.e, updates all the remote tracking branches). But merges only the current branch. This is a default behavior of git pull when no argument passed.

As you were on a diff branch when you git pull, it just updated the remote tracking branch for dev. Now git merge would be enough to update your local branch dev.