[andrewflnr]

Because then git would be doing magic stuff you don't (necessarily) understand, and people who like that aren't git's target audience. Those are all separate pieces of functionality that shouldn't be stuck together by default.

[jzwinck]

The same argument could be applied against git pull, which is really the concatenation of fetch and merge (or rebase). I agree with the previous poster that there should be better defaults available to non-tweakers.

[andrewflnr]

Git pull always seemed weird to me too. I don't use it.