Remote Repositories and Synchronization - Git Recipes - page 375

fig --unset commands turned her local tracking branch named master into an
ordinary local branch. That's good.
Now Sarah wants to create her local tracking branch named john to be connected
with John's master branch. She runs:
# sarah's command
$ git branch john
$ git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/master john
Then she fetches from John's repository with $ git fetch . The command
fetches all the missing revisions from the master branch in John's repo as well as a
new remote tracking branch remotes/origin/sarah . Sarah doesn't need John's
origin/sarah branch, but there is no way to avoid it.
Next Sarah switches to the john branch and checks its status:
# sarah's command
$ git checkout john
$ git status -sb
The output says that the current branch ( john ) is three commits behind the remote
tracking branch (which is origin/master ). She updates her john branch with:
$ git rebase
She inspects John's revisions j4 , j5 , j6 . Then she merges John's work into her
master branch:
$ git rebase john master
How does John update his project?
To download and merge all of Sarah's code John runs following commands:
$ git fetch
$ git checkout sarah
$ git rebase
$ git rebase sarah master