One useful feature Git has had since 1.7.0 is the ability to refer to the branch that another one is tracking using [branch]@{upstream} notation. I’ve found this especially handy while working on projects with multiple committers.

When working on projects with multiple committers, I usually set my local copies of the integration branches to track the branch from the canonical repository (which I typically have as the upstream remote) instead of tracking the copy of the integration branch from my fork of the repository. By doing this I can quickly bring my local copy of the tracking branch up to date with the canonical repository.

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% git checkout 2.7.x
% git fetch --all
Fetching origin
Fetching upstream
remote: Counting objects: 20, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
remote: Total 11 (delta 8), reused 7 (delta 4)
Unpacking objects: 100% (11/11), done.
From git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet
   45f0855..2fd94d2  2.7.x      -> upstream/2.7.x
% git reset --hard 2.7.x@{upstream}
HEAD is now at 2fd94d2 Merge branch 'tickets/2.7.x/8119' into 2.7.x

Normally I don’t use the 2.7.x@{upstream} form, however. Instead, I use @{u}, which takes advantage of the shorter form, as well as @{u} and @{upstream} defaulting to the current branch if none is specified. git reset --hard @{u} is fairly easy to type, and trivially aliased to use as a shortcut to make sure the integration branch is up to date before merging.