I want to work on a repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/pyca/cryptography
$ cd cryptography
Now I have a local repo, with master checked out, and master is tracking
origin/master.
I want to work on a feature, so I create a local branch for doing some hacking:
$ git checkout -b sweet-feature-branch
Now I have sweet-feature-branch checked out, it's not tracking anything, and
my current commit is the same as master.
Now I do some hacking, change some files, and make a commit:
$ git commit -am "lol computers"
Now I'm on sweet-feature-branch, and it is one commit ahead of master.
In working on my totally awesome feature, I realized that a few things need to be refactored, so I'm going to make a new branch for that.
$ git checkout master
$ git pull
$ git checkout -b cleanup-branch
I switch over to master, because I want to start working from there, do a
quick pull to see if anything new happened on origin, and create a new branch
on which to do my work.
I do more computer work and commit:
$ git commit -am "sweet refactor"
Now, in a Github pull request workflow, I'd push this to my fork, and create the PR:
$ git remote add alex https://github.com/alex/cryptography
$ git push -u alex cleanup-branch
I'm still on cleanup-branch, it is one commit ahead of master, and I'm now
tracking alex/cleanup-branch. I go into my web browser, create a PR, and lets
say it gets merged.
Now I want to flip back over to my sweet-feature-branch and finish up that
work.
$ git checkout master
$ git pull
$ git branch -D cleanup-branch
$ git checkout sweet-feature-branch
Now I'm back on sweet-feature-branch, which still doesn't track anything, and
which is one commit ahead and one commit behind.
Now I'll either rebase or merge master, which I do depends on how I'm feeling
on any particular day (because I like squash merges, it largely doesn't matter).
$ git merge master
Maybe it merges cleanly, maybe I need to resolve conflicts, that's mostly orthogonal to the point of this.
$ hg clone https://hghub.com/pyca/cryptography
$ cd cryptography
$ hg bookmark sweet-feature-branch
$ hg ci -m "lol computers"
$ # I do not know how to `git checkout master` now.