title: Ramifications of forgetting slash in "git merge origin/branch"
body: <p>Per <a href="http://longair.net/blog/2009/04/16/git-fetch-and-merge/" rel="nofollow" title="git: fetch and merge, don’t pull">this article</a>, I've tried to get myself in the habit of fetching and merging explicitly when updating my working copy. However, today I made a typo when issuing the command: </p>
  
  <pre><code>$ git fetch origin
  $ git merge origin asdf
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Note that I used a space instead of a forward slash on the merge command. Because it appeared to have had the desired effect anyway, I didn't notice until I had already pushed that it had added a strangely worded commit to the log:</p>
  
  <pre><code>commit 65f0037bed926c338cb95e7437e7f7f407028d9f
  Author: Me &lt;my_email@example.com&gt;
  Date:   Mon May 14 09:36:44 2012 -0700
  
      Merge branch 'asdf', remote-tracking branch 'origin' into asdf
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now I'm wondering if this actually had any negative side effects. It seems like it treated the arguments as two separate branch specs to merge into the current branch, and that "origin" would have implicitly expanded to "origin/asdf" &mdash; which is what I actually intended. At that point, I have no idea why it would even permit "Merge branch 'asdf' into asdf" to occur.</p>
  
  <p>Was this just an embarrassing no-op? Or have I introduced a potentially problematic construct into my repository history?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Output of <code>git cat-file commit 65f0037b</code></p>
  
  <pre><code>tree 74ed9ead4b82e4e56bd5656ee10375f8f0fcb60d
  parent 3bc2a37031a4a391aa4da64c22e3f55148cd23e2
  author Me &lt;my_email@example.com&gt; 1337013404 -0700
  committer Me &lt;my_email@example.com&gt; 1337013404 -0700
  
      Merge branch 'asdf', remote-tracking branch 'origin' into asdf
  </code></pre>