I have cloned a repository, after which somebody else has created a new branch, which I'd like to start working on. I read the manual, and it seems dead straight easy. Strangely it's not working, and all the posts I've found suggest I'm doing the right thing. So I'll subject myself to the lambasting, because there must be something obviously wrong with this:
The correct action seems to be
git fetch
git branch -a
* master
remotes/origin/HEAD --> origin/master
remotes/origin/master
git checkout -b dev-gml origin/dev-gml
At this point there is a problem, for some reason after git fetch I can't see the dev-gml remote branch. Why not? If I clone the repository freshly, it's there, so certainly the remote branch exists:
$ mkdir ../gitest
$ cd ../gitest
$ git clone https://github.com/example/proj.git
Cloning into proj...
remote: Counting objects: 1155, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (383/383), done.
remote: Total 1155 (delta 741), reused 1155 (delta 741)
Receiving objects: 100% (1155/1155), 477.22 KiB | 877 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (741/741), done.
$ cd projdir
$ git branch -a
* master
remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
remotes/origin/dev-gml
remotes/origin/master
I've tried git update, git pull, git fetch --all, git pretty-please in all possible permutations...
The problem can be seen when checking the remote.origin.fetch setting
(The lines starting with $ are bash prompts with the commands I typed. The other lines are the resulting output)
$ git config --get remote.origin.fetch
+refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master
As you can see, in my case, the remote was set to fetch the master branch specifically and only. I fixed it as per below, including the second command to check the results.
$ git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"
$ git config --get remote.origin.fetch
+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
The wildcard * of course means everything under that path.
Unfortunately I saw this comment after I had already dug through and found the answer by trial and error.
Edit: It seems this happens if you do a shallow clone - e.g. git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SomeRepo would cause this problem.
Adding from the comments
Note that this can happen if you have cloned your repository with a single branch only, e.g. git clone --branch --single-branch [] – Narretz
A shallow clone with git clone --depth implies --single-branch, as noted in the man page git-clone(1), so we'd better do it with git clone --depth --no-single-branch . – whatacold