Say my current branch is myfeature. I want to get master up to date. Both git merge git pull always merge into the current branch, as far as I can tell.
Is there a way to merge changes from a remote branch (eg, origin/master) into a branch I'm not currently on (master)? I can think of one way:
git stash
git checkout master
git pull origin/master
git checkout myfeature
git stash apply
Is there a better one?
(It's possibly my whole question is wrong: would git fetch automatically update master to match origin/master, if remote-tracking is enabled?)
You are correct that pull/merge only merges into the current branch.
You can, however, still use fetch. For instance (names below changed to protect the innocent but the hashes are real):
$ git branch | grep '^*'
* SOMEBRANCH
$ git rev-parse OTHER_BRANCH origin/OTHER_BRANCH
7b9b8e57cf19964b60ebda0f03a1d5da3de9e2fe
7b9b8e57cf19964b60ebda0f03a1d5da3de9e2fe
$ git fetch
7b9b8e5..1efca56 OTHER_BRANCH -> origin/OTHER_BRANCH
$ git rev-parse OTHER_BRANCH origin/OTHER_BRANCH
7b9b8e57cf19964b60ebda0f03a1d5da3de9e2fe
1efca56c08b7a0f511a3951195656a798c56aa62
In this case, fetch updated a bunch of origin/ branches. None of the local branches were updated (git rev-parse output for those remains the same) but the new commits are now in the repo and can be viewed (git log origin/OTHER_BRANCH, gitk --all, etc).
Depending on your needs, this might be sufficient. In particular you can see what needs to be applied from origin/master onto master, all without leaving your current branch.