What are common use cases for git fetch?

Question

I'm learning Git, and helping some co-workers get up to speed with it. So far, I haven't found a good reason to use git fetch. It just doesn't seem to have a lot of utility compared to using git pull or even git pull --rebase judiciously.

I discussed this question with a co-worker, and he came up with some relatively narrow and contrived situations where a git fetch would be used independently in a workflow, but I'm still not really convinced (eg updating branches that do not have a set upstream source, requiring updates to local repos without conflicts before commiting).

Are there any good use cases for using git fetch regularly?

Answer 1

I use it when it just want to know whether there are new changes.

Another use case is git fetch -t, which is necessary if tags have been moved (IMHO not a good idea).