From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:53:35 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v25 2/2] status: show comparison with push remote tracking branch
Message-ID: <20260115195335.GA1053259@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <0037e6b9-e57d-4cd3-b156-c8cbf439347a@gmail.com>

On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 10:31:41AM +0000, Phillip Wood wrote:

> On 13/01/2026 17:03, Jeff King wrote:
> > 
> > Can we make this configurable?
> > 
> > I build my daily driver off of the 'jch' branch, which now includes this
> > series, and I've found that for my triangular workflow the ahead/behind
> > for the push branch is just useless noise. I treat my push destination
> > like a mirror, where I always just push up everything at the end of the
> > day.
> 
> This is a slight tangent but if we're taking about making things
> configurable I've never found the actual values of the ahead/behind numbers
> particularly useful. In a triangular workflow all I'm really interested in
> is whether (a) my local branch is behind the upstream branch and if so is it
> going to be a pig to rebase it, and (b) my local branch matches the push
> branch (i.e. do I need to run "git push"). I don't really care exactly how
> many commits ahead or behind the local branch is, the counts are just
> distracting and don't really answer the "is it going to be a pig to rebase"
> question - the only way to answer that is to try it and see.

I mostly feel the same way. The only time I recall thinking the numbers
were important is when they are wildly out of place. You "git checkout"
a branch and it is 1500 commits ahead/behind or something, and you know
you've screwed up setting the tracking branch somehow. ;)

> So as well as configuring whether we show the comparison the push branch it
> would be nice to be able to configure a simpler output as well. That does
> not need to be part of this series but perhaps we should design the
> configuration to be extendable.

Yeah, I agree with all of that.

-Peff