Re: How to get failed refs with new 'git fetch' behavior?

From: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com>
Date: Jan 20, 2026, 08:03 UTC
Message-ID: <913c7904-1f31-4d76-bb4e-178ab94f0e71@app.fastmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAM8dTE=RciNHyyyhtprjXL22deTrzj5DKcBsSiAt0jFz6Az8JQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 20, 2026, at 07:19, Stepan Tsymbal wrote:

Show 24 quoted lines

> Appreciate your time and effort on developing and supporting the tool!
> I hope you can help me understand how to work with new behavior
> introduced in 2.51.
>
> We parse output of ‘git fetch’ command in Bitbucket - in automation
> that synchronizes mirrors. And from the output we see what references
> were successfully updated and what failed.
>
> In 0e358de (fetch: use batched reference updates) ‘git fetch’ started
> to use batched reference updates. Which is a great improvement by
> itself, and required the change in 'git fetch' output.
>
>[snip]
>
> Reproducible example:
>     mkdir first && cd first
>     git init -b main
>     git commit --allow-empty -m "initial commit"
>     git clone ../first ../second
>     git switch -c branch_path
>     git commit --allow-empty -m "another commit"
>     cd ../second
>     git update-ref refs/remotes/origin/branch_path/conflict HEAD
>     git fetch

I think this is fixed by the topic kn/ref-batch-output-error-reporting-fix:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260114-633-regression-lost-diagnostic-message-when-pushing-non-commit-objects-to-refs-heads-v1-6-f5f8b173c501@gmail.com/

The output when I use Git v2.52.0 on that script:

    ...
    Unpacking objects: 100% (1/1), 170 bytes | 170.00 KiB/s, done.
    From <path>
     * [new branch]      branch_path -> origin/branch_path
    error: some local refs could not be updated; try running
     'git remote prune origin' to remove any old, conflicting branches

This topic is merged to branch ‘seen’ right now (678fb955 (Merge branch 'dw/config-global-list' into seen, 2026-01-17)). This is the output there:

    ...
    Unpacking objects: 100% (1/1), 171 bytes | 171.00 KiB/s, done.
    error: some local refs could not be updated; try running
     'git remote prune origin' to remove any old, conflicting branches
    From <path>
     ! [new branch]      branch_path -> origin/branch_path  (unable to update local ref)