Git help, please

[Phil Holmes]

I have read the documentation, and the CG, but still am not sufficiently 
sure of the answer to my following questions to go ahead.

Background: it seems to me the safest way to be sure that all the updates 
I'm going to do to the snippets don't kill the documentation build is to 
test it on a clean build (which my patchy user pretty much is).  I believe 
the easiest way to do that will be to create a patch with my normal user, 
upload that to a new remote branch: dev/philh; then log in to patchy, pull 
master, pull dev/philh and do a full make, make test, make doc.  Problem is, 
I can't find documentation I can unerringly follow to:

a) create the remote branch origin/dev/name
b) push my master (or other) branch to that remote branch
c) pull the changes in that branch to a local machine
d) revert the patch if need be (I'd like idiot's instructions to this 
anyway, if possible)

Can anyone help with this, please?

--
Phil Holmes