They are two different symbolic names that can point to different things. refs/heads/master
is a branch in your working copy named master
. Frequently that is a tracking branch of refs/remotes/origin/master
because origin
is the default name for the remote created by git clone
and its primary branch is usually also named master
.
You can see the difference between them with git rev-list refs/heads/master..refs/remotes/origin/master
which will be empty if they are the same and will otherwise list the commits between them.