From: Ingo Molnar Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:13:47 GMT Subject: [OT] Your branch is ahead of the tracked remote branch 'origin/master' by 50 commits. Message-ID: <20080701091347.GA11817@elte.hu> i recently switched to 1.5.6.1.89.gd5446 and i'm getting this: Switched to branch "master" Your branch is ahead of the tracked remote branch 'origin/master' by 50 commits. it's a very useful detail! It's especially useful when two branches diverge in a non-trivial way. I used to have ad-hoc scripts to discover this in the past: earth4:~/tip> tip-compare-remote master : differs from remote (-50 commits) tip : differs from remote (-1 commits) x86/ptrace : differs from remote (-1 commits) x86/unify-setup : differs from remote (-2 commits) x86/xen-64bit : differs from remote (-1 commits) but having a reminder at checkout time is even better (and faster as well). Kudos. Ingo