Your branch is ahead of 'upstream/develop' by 540 commits.

[swaldman]

~/dw (develop)$ git status
# On branch develop
# Your branch is ahead of 'upstream/develop' by 540 commits.

Did we ever figure out what causes this? I have a theory, but I don't really understand...

(Theory: the dwu script does "git pull --ff-only upstream develop" straight from the remote repo into the local develop branch. This doesn't update the local copy of "remotes/upstream/develop" that was created by a "git fetch" sometime in the past. This is what the current branch is being compared to. I have no idea whether this makes sense, and if so how to deal with it...)

Comments

[kareila]

I'm not sure your theory is correct, but if it is, then I think typing "git fetch upstream" would bring it back into sync. That's weird though, because I thought doing a pull included fetching.

Is your upstream remote the canonical DW repo, or your fork of it? If it's your fork, you'll occasionally need to pull from the former and push back to the latter to keep them in sync. I don't use the "dwu" script so I have no idea if or how it handles that situation, but that might be what's going on?

[swaldman]

Git fetch does make the problem go away, but it comes straight back again a few days later, the next time I update.
Doing a pull includes fetching for *that specific branch* that is specified - but I don't think it will update all the various "remote/*/*" branches that a plain "git fetch" does. AIUI.

And yes, on my setup, upstream = dw-free, origin = my fork of it.

[shadowspar]

I think kar has p.much nailed it -- for some reason, your upstream remote isn't getting updated with changes from dreamwidth. Bear with me while I think out loud:

"Your branch is ahead of '[remote]/[branchname]' by 540 commits" is Git's funny way of saying that, according to its current state of knowledge, your local branch currently has 540 commits that aren't present on the remote. Conversely, when Git says your branch is behind, your local branch is missing commits that are present on the remote. (And hilariously enough, it's possible to be both "ahead" and "behind" at the same time...)

When you pull commits into your local branch from dreamwidth, your local branch moves ahead of your forked branch on Github -- your local branch now has all those changes from the mainline of DW development, but your branch on Github doesn't have them yet. So if you have your branch on Github set up as the remote named 'origin', then after a pull from dreamwidth, git push origin develop will send all those commits over to it, making its contents the same as your local branch. And every time you pull in an update from dreamwidth, you'll have to push those new commits back to origin to avoid seeing the "x commits ahead" message.

I'm not sure which version of the dwu script you've got -- it's changed over time -- but the current one in the wiki does push back to the remote named 'origin'. It fetches from the remote named 'dreamwidth'. Do you by chance have a third remote named 'upstream'? If so, that might explain why 'upstream' is always behind -- it's never getting updated.

To see what remotes you have and what they're pointed at, try git remote -v:

twilight:~/git/dw-free rick$ git remote -v
dreamwidth      git://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free.git (fetch)
dreamwidth      git://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free.git (push)
origin  git://github.com/rickscott/dw-free.git (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:rickscott/dw-free.git (push)

Then you can see how the local↔remote branches are wired up for a specific remote with git remote show <remotename>:

twilight:~/git/dw-free rick$ git remote show origin
* remote origin
  Fetch URL: https://rickscott@github.com/rickscott/dw-free.git
  Push  URL: https://rickscott@github.com/rickscott/dw-free.git
  HEAD branch: develop
  Remote branches:
    bug4650-gitify-bootstrap.pl              tracked
    bug5003-remove-hg-links                  tracked
    bug5117-lolno                            tracked
    bug5149-youtube-embed-rel-urls           new (next fetch will store in remotes/origin)
    master                                   tracked
    release-1.13                             tracked
    release-1.14                             tracked
    release-1.16                             new (next fetch will store in remotes/origin)
    scratchpad-5149                          tracked
  Local branch configured for 'git pull':
    scratchpad-5149 merges with remote scratchpad-5149
  Local refs configured for 'git push':
    develop         pushes to develop         (local out of date)
    master          pushes to master          (up to date)
    scratchpad-5149 pushes to scratchpad-5149 (up to date)

[denise]

You are the best shadowspar out of all the shadowspars ever <3

[swaldman]

your upstream remote isn't getting updated with changes from dreamwidth.

Thanks, but I'm afraid I explained poorly. My upstream remote *is* dreamwidth. I put my dwu together when we first switched to git, so some of the names are different, but I've just checked and to all intents and purposes it's the same as the current version on the wiki, except that what that calls "dreamwidth" I call "upstream".

~/dw (develop)$ git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/swaldman3/dw-free.git (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/swaldman3/dw-free.git (push)
upstream        https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free.git (fetch)
upstream        https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free.git (push)

~/dw (develop)$ git remote show upstream
* remote upstream
  Fetch URL: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free.git
  Push  URL: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free.git
  HEAD branch: develop
  Remote branches:
    develop        tracked
    master         tracked
    release-1.11.0 tracked
    release-1.12   tracked
    release-1.13   tracked
    release-1.14   tracked
    release-1.15   tracked
    release-1.16   new (next fetch will store in remotes/upstream)
    release-1.17   new (next fetch will store in remotes/upstream)
    release-1.18   new (next fetch will store in remotes/upstream)
  Local branches configured for 'git pull':
    develop merges with remote develop
    master  merges with remote master
  Local refs configured for 'git push':
    develop pushes to develop (up to date)
    master  pushes to master  (up to date)
~/dw (develop)$ git status
# On branch develop
# Your branch is ahead of 'upstream/develop' by 540 commits.
#

[swaldman]

For completeness, here's my current dwu script:

https://gist.github.com/swaldman3/6482639

(small differences are there because I put in a "put me back on the branch I started on" mechanism before the version in the wiki had that, and because I have a different name for the dreamwidth repo)

[swaldman]

To elaborate slightly on what I *think* is going on: consider this output:

~/dw (develop)$ git branch -a
  4504_twitter_before_interactive
  4504_twitter_postreview
  4504_twitter_pre_rebase
  4709_manage_index_TT
* develop
  master
  remotes/origin/4504_twitter
  remotes/origin/4504_twitter_postreview
  remotes/origin/4709_manage_index_TT
  remotes/origin/4847_favicons
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/develop
  remotes/origin/develop
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/upstream/develop
  remotes/upstream/master
  remotes/upstream/release-1.11.0
  remotes/upstream/release-1.12
  remotes/upstream/release-1.13
  remotes/upstream/release-1.14
  remotes/upstream/release-1.15

The important thing here is that there are *four* different versions of (say) develop. We don't care about the version on origin, which is my github fork, but the other three:

• There's the develop branch on the dreamwidth repo on github, which is not shown here.
  
• There's develop, which is the local branch that I could mess with. This is updated from the dreamwidth repo on github whenever I run dwu.
  
• There's remotes/upstream/develop, which (AIUI) is a local copy of that branch from the dreamwidth repo. Importantly this is not updated by the dwu script, but only by a git fetch upstream.

So what I think is happening is that,

1. At some time in the past I have done a git fetch, which has given me the local copy of the repo at remotes/upstream/develop.
   
2. Since then I have used dwu, which has updated develop but has not updated remotes/upstream/develop.
   
3. Therefore, develop - which is in sync with the github repo - is ahead of remotes/upstream/develop
   

This would explain why running git fetch makes the message go away for a while,and would explain why I get this message while not having any actual problems in working (because the branch that I actually work on is up to date).
The problem may not have been seen very much (although I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one) because somebody who always uses git fetch won't see it,and somebody who has only ever used the dwu script won't see it either.

Or, have I totally misunderstood how the remotes/* branches work?

[shadowspar]

AIUI, git pull remotename branchname is exactly equivalent to git fetch remotename ; git merge remotes/remotename/branchname. Too, I'm pretty sure Git updates the branch pointers under remotes/ every time it talks to the remote in question, although if this isn't happening for some reason, it'd explain why it thinks you are behind the upstream branch you just pulled from.

Is this happening on your Dreamhack, by chance? If so, d'you mind if I take a look at your git repository there and see if I can figure out what's going on?

[swaldman]

Hmm, if it is equivalent then I'm at a total loss.
Yes, it's on my dreamhack, and feel free to have a look if you have the time. My username there is dh-swaldman.

[alierak]

Note that the wiki dwu script does "git fetch dreamwidth", while swaldman's does not do any explicit fetch. If pull is exactly equivalent to fetch plus merge, I don't get why this would matter.

ETA: Aha, okay, git pull --ff-only is not equivalent to fetch + merge, "it doesn't fetch all upstream commits (just the ones for the branch you're working on)". (Unfortunately the reference for this is a StackOverflow question with an agenda, not official documentation, but oh well.)

[swaldman]

Ah, thanks, I missed that. This does beg the question of why the script then does pull rather than merge, but it would explain why people using that script don't see what I'm seeing. And would suggest that my theory above is approximately correct.

I'm unable to actually check anything at present, though, because this hotel's "free wifi" blocks SSH....

[swaldman]

So summary, AFAICS:
I was right in what was going on, but the "official" script doesn't do this because it does a "git fetch" at the start, thus updating all the remote branches.

Once it's done this, it then does "pull" for develop and master, which means looking at them in the upstream repo again for no particular reason...

Proposal: In the official script, change lines of the form
"git pull --ff-only dreamwidth develop"
to the form
"git merge --ff-only remotes/dreamwidth/develop".

I've just tried this (with dreamwidth substituted with upstream for my setup) and it seems to work, and it should mean hitting github less often.

Also, the "git fetch" should probably be changed to "git fetch -p" so that any branches removed from the dreamwidth github repo are also removed locally.

Asking here rather than just changing it in the wiki it in case there's a reason not to :-)

[fu]

If you're still unsure, make a new top-level post to see if anyone else has any objections :)

[sophie]

I know I've had odd issues in the past when manually doing a fetch/merge instead of a pull. I expected the two to be equivalent, but that wasn't the case. I don't remember what happened, though.

[swaldman]

Well at present we're doing both!

Might those issues have been around the difference that I was describing? (that fetch gets all branches)

[geekosaur]

The question is whether it's "tracked" or not, I think. Tracked branches get updated automatically. "remotes" is not a magic prefix, just a convention; it's the tracked status that actually matters.

[fu]

Hmm. That makes sense, but it appears to be tracked (as it should be), based on swaldman's comment above:

Remote branches:
develop tracked