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copied!<p>The main things that come to mind for having a local branch track another local branch are (1) more informed messages from Git regarding a branch being ahead/behind of the tracked branch and (2) trigger hooks.</p> <p>One area Git displays more information is when creating a branch. Creating a <a href="http://book.git-scm.com/3_basic_branching_and_merging.html">basic branch</a> looks like the following:</p> <pre><code>$ git co -b A master Switched to a new branch 'A' </code></pre> <p>While creating a <a href="http://book.git-scm.com/4_tracking_branches.html">tracking branch</a> looks like:</p> <pre><code>$ git co --track -b B master Branch B set up to track local branch master. Switched to a new branch 'B' </code></pre> <p>This would add the following in <code>.git/config</code>:</p> <pre><code>[branch "B"] remote = . merge = refs/heads/master </code></pre> <p>After committing some changes on branches <code>A</code> and <code>B</code>, executing <code>git status -s -b</code> on branch <code>A</code> displays <code>## A</code> while on branch <code>B</code> it displays <code>## B...master [ahead 1, behind 1]</code>, providing some quick information regarding the relationship between branches <code>B</code> and <code>master</code>.</p> <p>The other area where you might want a local branch track another local branch is to trigger <a href="http://book.git-scm.com/5_git_hooks.html">hooks</a>; in particular <code>pre-receive</code>, <code>update</code>, <code>post-receive</code> and <code>post-update</code> during a <a href="http://schacon.github.com/git/git-push.html"><code>git push</code></a>. You might have hooks to, for example, trigger a build on a continuous integration server, do some license header checks, check for white space format errors, etc.</p>

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