From: Stepan Tsymbal <stsymbal@atlassian.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2026 06:19:59 GMT
Subject: How to get failed refs with new 'git fetch' behavior?
Message-ID: <CAM8dTE=RciNHyyyhtprjXL22deTrzj5DKcBsSiAt0jFz6Az8JQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hello everyone,
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.

With git 2.50, when repositories had directory/file ref conflicts, the
errors were explicit:
    $ git fetch
    error: cannot lock ref 'refs/remotes/origin/branch_path':
     'refs/remotes/origin/branch_path/conflict' exists; cannot create
'refs/remotes/origin/branch_path'
    From /Users/stsymbal/repos/git-conflict-test/first/../first
     ! [new branch]      branch_path -> origin/branch_path  (unable to
update local ref)
    error: some local refs could not be updated; try running
     'git remote prune origin' to remove any old, conflicting branches

And git 2.51, in the same situation, no longer tells what ref failed:
    $ git fetch
    From /Users/stsymbal/repos/git-conflict-test/first/../first
     * [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

It is trivial in case of a single ref being fetched, but when fetching
many refs there is no obvious way to see which one failed. For other
errors there will be a single error message per ref, but not for
directory/file conflict.
The 'reference-transaction' hook also lists all references as committed.

Is it expected behavior moving forward? Can you suggest any
workarounds to know what refs were successful / failed?

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

Thanks!