fr0sty was definitely not tactful, but his commands are correct. Merge always brings the branch you specify onto the commit you are currently on. The branch command either lists branches (when no other arguments, only certain options, are specified) or creates branches. Checkout is the command used to move around between commits in your repository.

Branching and merging is covered pretty well by Pro Git[1]

[1] http://progit.org/book/ch3-2.html

Not at all. Where did you come up with that? That would merge in any commits in master not already in experimental and the next command would fail because a branch 'master' already exists.

To do what you are describing you would do this (or something similar:

    git checkout master; git merge experimental

Thanks, obviously I'm missing some concept somewhere.

The checkout command moves you off the experimental branch and back onto the master branch.

The merge command then takes the commits in experimental that aren't in master and puts them into master.

Thanks, I think I may have been misusing

    git branch [some name]

I'll take a look at some of the suggested tutorials again. Thanks all. That said, I pretty much do straight-ahead main-line development, so this isn't a huge problem right now. I do most of my development after midnight, so there isn't a huge cognitive headroom left...

I'm still just getting the hang of git, but I've found this best practices[1] tutorial the most handy to just get started. I needed to play around at this basic level before any of these other more complicated comments started to make sense. Check it out, it's very short.

[1] http://ariejan.net/2009/06/08/best-practice-the-git-developm...