Subject: Do most people feel tracking branches useful?

From: Liu Yubao <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:55:48 +0800

Hi,

I often feel tracking branches are useless to me, because there are remote
branches and I work on my private branch in most time.

   repos
     |
     |-- my               (private branch, do my dirty work)
     |-- master           (tracking branch)
     |-- origin/master    (remote branch)

To avoid conflict when execute `git pull` and make the history linear, I work
on branch "my" instead of "master". Here is my work flow:

1) use `git fetch` or `git remote update` to synchronize branch "origin/master"
with branch "master" in remote repository;
2) create a new private branch to polish my commits and rebase it against
"origin/master";
3) at last push this new branch to the remote repository or ask the upstream
developer to fetch it(no `git pull` because we want history as linear as possible).

I don't want to bother with the tracking branch "master", it's identical
with "origin/master".  Because `git checkout -b xxx <remote_branch>`
will create a tracking branch "xxx" by default, so my question is:
do most people feel tracking branches useful?

BTW: I feel the terminalogy "remote branch" is confused, because I must
synchronize it with `git fetch`. I feel it's better to call it "tracking
branch" // seems will lead to bigger confusion to experienced git users:-(