Minor annoyance with git push

I have a minor UI issue with git pull. First, a bit of background: we run a "central team repo" development model -- and we track on one repo the "main" branches, and the client branches, where we do minor customisations and sometimes client-funded feature work that is later cherry-picked for the "main" branches. This is with a team of ~10 people, and lots of clients.

(To clarify: some clients are in specialised private repositories. Most are happy and actually request that our work should be public.)

As we run a central repo, we all get *all* the branches when we do fetch. A bit noisy, but no major issue. It is also a great thing as we get asked to help in various branches, so I'll often hop on a client branch that is mainly maintained by someone else, just to fix or enhance something on the authentication (which I specialise in). After that, I don't have much to do with that client branch.

This means that beyond the branches I actively work on, I also have local tracking branches for remote heads that I am not updating. When I say git push, these stale local tracking branches are making a lot of noise in the output:

To git+ssh://git.catalyst.net.nz/var/git/moodle-r2.git
 ! [rejected]        mdl17-ceo -> mdl17-ceo (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-local -> mdl18-local (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-masseyedu-wimbatest ->
mdl18-masseyedu-wimbatest (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-nmit -> mdl18-nmit (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-proxy -> mdl18-proxy (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-shared -> mdl18-shared (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-sqm -> mdl18-sqm (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-stcuthberts -> mdl18-stcuthberts (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl18-topnz -> mdl18-topnz (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl19-dbperf -> mdl19-dbperf (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl19-ucol -> mdl19-ucol (non-fast forward)
 ! [rejected]        mdl19-uow -> mdl19-uow (non-fast forward)
error: failed to push to 'git+ssh://git.catalyst.net.nz/var/git/moodle-r2.git'

The error messages ("! rejected", "error: failed to push") appear even if one or two branches did get pushed... I think they are a bit over the top. None of these "rejected" branches have anything _new_, they are just stale. Nothing new to say. Can we just ignore them, and only say "ZOMG Failure! Rejected!!1!!" if we fail to push *new* local commits that aren't in the repo (leading to an assumption that if the user said "push" he'd expect those new local commits to be pushed to the server)?

[ Personally, it doesn't bother me too much. But I can see some newcomers to my team, and their eyes twitch when they see all the exclamation marks. I've learned to look for the branch I care about being pushed in the output, but it's particularly not user friendly as it stands. ]

cheers,

m