Difference b/w a $ git pull and $ hg pull

Question

Steve Losh: A Guide to Branching in Mercurial -

Mercurial will push/pull all branches by default, while git will push/pull only the current branch.

I wonder if my understanding is right:

It occurs to me that when I do a git pull I actually do fetch from all branches but the merge happens only with the current branch that I am sitting on. This is very close to mercurial where a pull gets me everything from the remote; but does not merge anything yet.

In mercurial a push sends everything, but an explicit updateis needed to merge things back. I am not quite sure on git' behavior of the push operation.

Answer 1

In Git, you have to pull/push all the branches one by one. Thus, you can work on local branches without messing up the server.

You can specify each time which branch you want to pull/push on : git push origin master means you want to push your branch master on the one at origin, which is often the "default" server.