This is mostly of the nature of a curiosity as I'm trying to get familiar with Git. I have looked at the documentation for 'git fetch' but I don't see an obvious explanation for the below. Thanks in advance, and apologies if this is howlingly obvious.
1) From a central repository, say GitHub, I clone a repository named website on each of two machines, HostA and HostB.
2) on HostA, I make a change to a file, say README.txt, and commit it.
At this point on HostA, the commits for branches master and
origin/master are, as expected different since I haven't pushed yet
git show master
git show origin/master
report different hashes (since master has the change and origin/master does not)
3) Once I push, they are after that the same.
4) Now, over on HostB, if I do the following:
git fetch
git merge FETCH_HEAD
afterwards, on HostB master and origin/master report the same hash when queried with git show
BUT
if instead I had done, on HostB:
git fetch origin master
git merge FETCH_HEAD
at that point the hashes still differ.
git show origin
git show origin/master
report different hashes
The tracking branch origin/master isn't updated until I do a plain git fetch
Why is this?