If you are using topic branches, it's bad practice to merge from upstream when it is not necessary [1,2,3], because you clutter your branch with new features th

If you are using topic branches, it's bad practice to merge from upstream when it is not necessary [1,2,3], because you clutter your branch with new features that are mostly unrelated to what you are trying to accomplish. Consider merging the specific topic branch that you need rather than 'master'. Alternatively, if nothing depends on your branch yet, you can rebase onto 'master', though this may invalidate earlier testing. Now to your specific question (fast-forward a local branch without checking it out), you can git fetch origin master:master or git push . origin/master:master Then you can merge 'master' instead of 'origin/master', thus eliminating the remote URL or "remote-tracking" language from the prepared commit message. [1] http://gitster.livejournal.com/42247.html http://gitster.livejournal.com/42247.html [2] http://lwn.net/Articles/328436/ http://lwn.net/Articles/328436/ [3] http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/git_merges_from_upstream.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/git_merges_from_upstream.html