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What are the common use cases for git fetch?

I am learning Git and helping some colleagues get back on their feet to speed up. So far, I haven't found a compelling reason to use git fetch

. It doesn't seem like much usefull compared to use git pull

or even git pull --rebase

reasonable.

I discussed this with a co-worker and he came up with some relatively narrow and contrived situations where git fetch

would be used independently in a workflow, but I'm still not very convinced (for example, updating branches that do not have an upstream source requiring updating local repos without conflicts before they occur).

Are there any good use cases for regular use git fetch

?

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2 answers


I use it when it just wants to know if there are new changes.



Another use case is git fetch -t

, which is necessary if tags have been moved (IMHO not a good idea).

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I use it all the time, especially when I want to update some aspects of my local repo view before the repo without touching my working copy:

  • just to get the tags (say when someone added a release tag)
  • to get a new remote branch that I haven't used before (perhaps to start tracking a feature branch created by someone else)
  • just update origin/master

    without affectingmaster



As for why I might care about pull

touching my working copy, it's probably because:

  • I have uncommitted changes in my current branch that I don't want to commit yet.
  • ... and I don't want to store them just for this
  • I like the current state of the HEAD or working tree (maybe I have an assembly running in the background and can't pull

    update the source files underneath)
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