I've been having trouble with git push apparently resending the entire commit trace for the branch each and every time I push; even with short branch names. This seems to be related to the changes made to handle the case where the remote end has a large number of branches (>900). The problem there seemed to be that we would fill list-revs' argument list in reference order with negative and positive limits. This could lead to us to exceed the limit 900 argument limit and bomb. The changes made in commit 797656e58ddbd82ac461a5142ed726db3a4d0ac0 split the parameter loading into two phases. First we load the +ve and -ve references for the branches we are definatly trying to send; bailing if we cannot fit those references onto the command line. Second we load up the remaining remote references as -ve references to limit duplicate object sends. This second phase loads up to 16 additional references onto the command line. Now this effectively limits you to 16 branchs in your remote repository if you wish to ensure you catch a parental head to copy from. This can lead us to send the entire commit stream for the branch even though the branch may contain no new commits. It seems to me that any and all negative references we have are helpful and as such we should be loading as many as we can into the list. If we cannot fit them all we should _not_ error out, but we should not limit ourselves to any less than as many as we can fit. Can anyone see a downside to the patch below? -apw