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4.9 Points to Remember

There are some important points to remember:

• Always do a ‘make distclean’ before switching between branches. Things will get really confused if you don’t.
• For upstream branches, always work with tracking branches. Never use ‘git checkout origin/whatever’. Git will happily let you do something like that, but it’s just plain asking for trouble.
• Make sure your tracking branches are up-to-date before doing anything with them, particularly using them as the basis for a rebase or merge. This typically means a three-step process:

  $ git checkout master             Get to local copy
  $ git pull                        Bring it up to date
  $ git checkout feature/python     Go back to your branch
  

  You can then do the actual rebase:

  $ git rebase master               Now rebase your feature off of master
  

• Git always treats the currently checked-out branch as the object of operations. For example, when comparing files with the regular diff command, the usage is ‘diff oldfile newfile’. For ‘git diff’, the current branch takes the place of newfile, thus:

  $ git checkout feature/python
  $ git diff master                 Compare master to current branch
  

  or if merging:

  $ git checkout master             Checkout master
  $ git pull                        Update tracking branch
  $ git merge feature/python        Merge changes into master