I don't think using `git pull` is a particular good way of working. A pull is a fetch and merge or a rebase combined.
If it's difficult to keep your mental model of some system up to date, I doubt that doing bigger steps at once makes things easier.
So
1. run `git fetch`
2. if the textual output does not tell you what has happened, run `gitk -all`
3. Decide what to do. Rebase, merge, whatever.
Of course if you know exactly what you are doing, pull can be fine. If you changed the repo yourself on another computer that is the case. Otherwise, how can you know your second step, before having even seen the data you are operating on? Well, it can work, but if it doesn't, don't complain.
> I don't think using `git pull` is a particular good way of working.
I agree. For a DVCS like git, separating the network transaction from updating the working copy on disk is the best way to go about it. Going in the other direction, this is the default since git add, git commit and git push are executed separately.
This is literally the first advice I give when teaching people git. The first months of use, just run the two commands separate. Many mistakes are avoided that way.
I agree, but I end up using `pull` anyway just because the alternative is so tedious. I wish there was a short command that did the same thing as pull without fetch: merge the remote-tracking version of the current branch's default upstream into the current branch.
Essentially the whole concept of "upstream" is weird and non-orthogonal. Another one that bothers me is that as far as I can see there's no way to globally turn off setting an upstream on newly created branches (I can pass a flag to the specific "git branch" command, but that's tedious and error-prone).
If it's difficult to keep your mental model of some system up to date, I doubt that doing bigger steps at once makes things easier.
So
1. run `git fetch`
2. if the textual output does not tell you what has happened, run `gitk -all`
3. Decide what to do. Rebase, merge, whatever.
Of course if you know exactly what you are doing, pull can be fine. If you changed the repo yourself on another computer that is the case. Otherwise, how can you know your second step, before having even seen the data you are operating on? Well, it can work, but if it doesn't, don't complain.