On Tue, Feb 02, 2021 at 07:38:59AM +0100, Tassilo Horn wrote:
> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> >
> > Would someone please tell me what "remote tracking" means, concretely?
> > What does that branch do?

[...]

> Your master branch is basically a copy of origin/master which is not
> automatically updated unless you tell it using "git pull" (or by merging
> or rebasing onto origin/master).

Just in case the above is unclear: you usually don't *want* "your"
master (or main, or devel) branch automatically updated, since you
(typically) will have made changes to them. You want to do an explicit
merge, at a time you are prepared to sort out the conflicts which
may arise.

Consider the "tracking" branches (origin/master, origin/main, or
whatever) as a cache of sorts for the remote repository "origin".

The nice thing about git is that it makes those things explicit [1].
It may be confusing at the beginning, but it gives you way more
freedom in the long run.

Cheers

[1] Caches are typically "implicit". You don't see the cache itself,
   things are just "magically" faster. To inspect the cache, you
   are supposed to buy the "pro kit", i.e. some debugger. Some
   implementations go the extra mile to make it difficult for the
   users to "see" the cache: they take the adage "information hiding"
   literally (too literally, for my taste ;-)

 - t