"git push" silently fails, says 'Everything up-to-date" when it's not.

"git push" silently fails, says 'Everything up-to-date" when it's not.

[David Woodhouse]

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I *thought* I'd pushed everything from my tree out to the server a
couple of weeks ago, and 'git push' appears to confirm that:

[dwmw2@shinybook mtd-2.6]$ git push
Everything up-to-date

But it lies. Only when I try to *pull* does it give me a hint:

[dwmw2@shinybook mtd-2.6]$ git pull
You are not currently on a branch, so I cannot use any
'branch.<branchname>.merge' in your configuration file.
Please specify which branch you want to merge with on the command
line and try again (e.g. 'git pull <repository> <refspec>').
See git-pull(1) for details.

So I've been happily thinking that my commits were actually in
linux-next for the last couple of weeks when they weren't. OK, I could
have checked in gitweb — silly me for trusting the tools.

Why would it do this evil thing and start lying to me? When it told me
'Everything up-to-date', precisely *what* was it telling me was up to
date? Did it ever push *anything*, *anywhere*, or was it just a complete
fabrication?

I don't quite know how I ended up "not currently on a branch" either. I
almost never use branches locally and my local tree has *never* been
changed to another branch; I always use separate trees instead of
branches. I may have committed a few things, then reverted them with
'git reset HEAD^^^^' and re-committed them with some changes. But that
shouldn't cause this, surely?

When I have a clone a remote tree, and I run 'git push', surely my HEAD
should be pushed to the HEAD of the remote tree? There's little excuse
for *telling* me it's up-to-date, when it's not!

I understand that some people like the branch facility even though I
find it mostly pointless, but I'd prefer that it didn't undermine basic
usability of git :(

-- 
dwmw2

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Re: "git push" silently fails, says 'Everything up-to-date" when it's not.

[Matthieu Moy]

David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> writes:

> [dwmw2@shinybook mtd-2.6]$ git push
> Everything up-to-date
>
> But it lies. Only when I try to *pull* does it give me a hint:
>
> [dwmw2@shinybook mtd-2.6]$ git pull
> You are not currently on a branch, so I cannot use any

What does

  git config push.default 

say?

You probably have push.default=matching, which is the default. In this
mode, Git will push all your local branches to remote branches having
the same name (regardless of which branch you currently have
checked-out). The commits you just did were not on any branch, so
they're not pushed.

> Why would it do this evil thing and start lying to me? When it told me
> 'Everything up-to-date', precisely *what* was it telling me was up to
> date? Did it ever push *anything*, *anywhere*, or was it just a complete
> fabrication?

It probably pushed your branches, but not commits done in detached HEAD.

> I don't quite know how I ended up "not currently on a branch" either.

Either you did "git checkout <some-commit-identifier>" (in which case
you had a big fat warning), or you used one command that runs in
detached HEAD like "git rebase" or "git bisect" without concluding the
operation ("git bisect reset", "git rebase --continue" or so).

With a recent enough version of Git, each commit you did in detached
head had this little reminder:

$ git commit -m foo
[detached HEAD acb1d5b] foo
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

As for the future, there's a patch serie in progress that will make "git
status" warn a bit more loudly in these cases, and give you a clue about
what to do next.

In Git 2.0, the push.default value will change to "simple", which errors
out like this in your case:

$ git push
fatal: You are not currently on a branch.
To push the history leading to the current (detached HEAD)
state now, use

    git push origin HEAD:<name-of-remote-branch>

If you can't wait to have this "simple" mode, you may want to set
push.default=upstream (or current), which will push the current branch
to its upstream (or to the one with the same name remotely).

I don't know what can be done to improve the case of detached HEAD with
push.default=matching. Perhaps Git should warn when HEAD is not pushed
(detached HEAD, or HEAD points to a branch that doesn't exist remotely)?

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/

Re: "git push" silently fails, says 'Everything up-to-date" when it's not.

[Junio C Hamano]

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

> I don't know what can be done to improve the case of detached HEAD with
> push.default=matching. Perhaps Git should warn when HEAD is not pushed
> (detached HEAD, or HEAD points to a branch that doesn't exist remotely)?

Please don't.  For those whose workflow clearly separates local
history building (checking different branches, making commits, etc.)
and publishing the result (git push), "git push" is *not* a way to
say "I am done with the work I have been doing on *this* branch",
but is a way to say "I am done for the day, and all the branches I
push out are in good order". It does not matter what branch the user
happens to be on when "git push" is run for them (including me).