"git pull . <branch>" does "git fetch . <branch>" and then merges it. Of
course, "git fetch . <branch>" does nothing at all, and it's weird as a
user interface to have the only (simple) way of selecting something to
merge be to fetch it as if from a remote repository, but from the local
repository. After all, no other purely local operation requires you to
I think everybody uses "git merge" instead of "git pull ." these days.
It's shorter and less fiddly to type, and doesn't polute your bash reverse
search for "git pull<tab>" with local things. And, if you've got a bunch
of local branches, which is not uncommon and very much native to git, the
intuitive thing is to merge them with "git merge" instead of treating them
as if they weren't local.
It's also now pretty common to want to do "git fetch <remote>", inspect
it, decide whether this is something you want to merge (and depend on),
and do "git merge <tracking>" to include it in your branch if you want it.
(And being able to fetch stuff from a remote location, and later do a
merge without any non-local information is also very git-style.)
Of course, if you're pulling from a remote repository, you generally want
to use "git pull", but you wouldn't be using "git pull ."
-Daniel
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