Tracking the HEAD of Git's master branchEdit

Created 11/17/2007, updated 5/18/2017

Every now and again an enhancement will make it into the Git master branch that you'd like to start using immediately. As described in "Structure of git.git", the master branch is "Reasonably tested and ready to be used in a production setting". Feature releases (eg 1.5.2, 1.5.3, 1.5.4) are occasionally cut from the tip of this branch. If you want to track the branch then the procedure is fairly straight forward.

# in an existing Git repository
git checkout master
git pull
git st

# build, test, install
make clean
make prefix=/usr/local all
make prefix=/usr/local test
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

Of course, this is not without its risks but you may consider it worthwhile for enhancements that are really important to you. I think that tracking the tip of master is a better idea than back-porting a specific enhancement, because master as a whole is intended to be a well-tested, dependable unit.

Note

A more detailed version of this article is available as "Tracking the Git maint or master branches".