Hello Git Developers,

I am writing to seek clarification and share feedback regarding unexpected requirements for force-pushing (--force or --force-with-lease) encountered by myself and several colleagues across different projects.

In our workflows, developers are encountering situations where a standard git push is rejected due to history divergence, prompting a need to force push, despite no local history rewrites or explicit manual force operations being executed prior.

Given that this has occurred independently across multiple users and separate project repositories, we are looking to better understand the underlying triggers within Git's tracking mechanism or upstream reference updates that might cause local and remote histories to diverge so unexpectedly.

Could this behavior be related to how underlying reference updates, fetch tracking, or concurrent background updates interact in recent Git versions? Any insights or guidance on how to audit or prevent this behavior at the Git client level would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and for maintaining such a powerful tool.

Best regards,

vishak