Re: Git repo on a machine with zero commits is ahead of remote by 103 commits.. !

From: Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 25, 2011, 07:23 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinC7yvHJj_onRRWBYaZ23Pvs0JB2DJT44Jy-JLG@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikj06sjTbNd8afk9cY2=_Hy+kT+J1NCjR-fKP5J@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Srirang Doddihal <om.brahmana@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 1) Why does "git status"  say that the local repo on the deployed
> machine (where no commits are made) is ahead of the remote by 103
> commits? (This number, 103, increases with every "git pull origin
> master" and very likely the change is equal to the number of commits
> pulled)

git status is comparing refs/heads/master, aka master, to its remote-tracking branch, refs/remotes/origin/master, aka origin/master.

master is ahead of origin/master because you've been updating the former but not the later, with your pull invocation.

> 2) Why is "git log orign/master" stuck at a Jan 8th commit?

Because you've been saying "git pull origin master", git has been doing the following:

- contacting origin and fetching all commits in its master not in your
local repo
- locally updating FETCH_HEAD with the results of that fetch
- performing a merge operation of FETCH_HEAD into your local master
- because you haven't made any local commits, that is a fast-forward operation
- updating your work tree

However, git is not updating your remote-tracking branch (origin/master).

> * How can I set these right?

Just do a "git pull" or "git pull origin". By not explicitly giving pull a branch, it consults two configuration variables in your .git/config for the currently checked out branch to figure out what you want it to do, namely:

  branch.master.remote
  branch.master.merge

Also in this case, it updates the origin/master remote-tracking branch.

(I think there has been previous discussion about this behavior - it seems broken to me that "git pull <remote> <branch>" doesn't update the corresponding remote-tracking branch <remote>/<branch> in the case where "git pull [<remote>]" would normally do so according to that repo's .git/config.)

j.