What does git remote add upstream help achieve

Question

I was reading on  https   wiki diasporafoundation org Git workflow Rebase your development branch on the latest upstream  Here is an extract      Your Repository Up to Date      In order to get the latest updates from the development trunk do a   one-time setup to establish the main GitHub repo as a remote by   entering     git remote add upstream git   github com diaspora diaspora git       Rebase Your Development Branch on the Latest Upstream      To keep your development branch up to date  rebase your changes on top   of the current state of the upstream master  See the What   s   git-rebase  section below to learn more about rebasing       If you   ve set up an upstream branch as detailed above  and a   development branch called 100-retweet-bugfix  you   d update upstream    update your local master  and rebase your branch from it like so     git fetch upstream    git checkout master    git rebase upstream master    git checkout 100-retweet-bugfix        make sure all is committed as necessary in branch     git rebase master    Why is adding a  remote upstream  needed in this case  Coudn t I have just done     git checkout master    git pull origin master    git checkout 100-retweet-bugfix    make sure all is committed as necessary in branch     git rebase master

User · Accepted Answer

The wiki is talking from a forked repo point of view. You have access to pull and push from origin, which will be your fork of the main diaspora repo. To pull in changes from this main repo, you add a remote, "upstream" in your local repo, pointing to this original and pull from it.

So "origin" is a clone of your fork repo, from which you push and pull. "Upstream" is a name for the main repo, from where you pull and keep a clone of your fork updated, but you don't have push access to it.

User · Answer

This is useful when you have your own origin which is not upstream  In other words  you might have your own origin repo that you do development and local changes in and then occasionally merge upstream changes  The difference between your example and the highlighted text is that your example assumes you re working with a clone of the upstream repo directly  The highlighted text assumes you re working on a clone of your own repo that was  presumably  originally a clone of upstream

User · Answer

I think it could be used for  retroactively forking   If you have a Git repo  and have now decided that it should have forked another repo  Retroactively you would like it to become a fork  without disrupting the team that uses the repo by needing them to target a new repo   But I could be wrong

User · Answer

Let s take an example  You want to contribute to django  so you fork its repository  In the while you work on your feature  there is much work done on the original repo by other people  So the code you forked is not the most up to date  setting a remote upstream and fetching it time to time makes sure your forked repo is in sync with the original repo

[git] What does 'git remote add upstream' help achieve?

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