I am having a hard time understanding the nuances of git-fetch. I understand that doing a fetch, fetches the remote refs into a local tracking branch.

I have a few questions though:

  1. Can it be possible that a local tracking branch does not exist? If so, will it then be created automatically?

  2. What will happen if I do a fetch and specify a non tracking branch as the destination?

  3. The man page for git-fetch specifies:

    git-fetch <options> <repository> <refspec>

How would I use the refspec to fetch contents from my remote master into its remote tracking branch? I believe this may be possible if my current HEAD is on master and I run

git fetch origin master

However, can I use the <+?src:dest> refspec to achieve the same thing? I think this will help me understand the concepts better.

And one more question:

My .git/config file has the following line for fetching (showing only relevant lines):

fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

Can someone please explain what this line exactly means?

git git-fetch
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