Question

In Git, I’d like to be able to see, at a glance, whether my repository and working directory are out of date. I often make the mistake of just running “git status” – but that doesn’t do any remote communication at all. Or, I’ll do this:

git fetch --all
git status

But that doesn’t show activity on other branches.

What’s a good, convenient way to get information like:

1. Are there updates to this branch in any remote repository?
2. Are there updates to any parent branch?
3. Have any new branches been made – who by, etc.

Answer 1

You can’t get “who by” since branch creation is not actually recorded anywhere. (You can find who owns the most recent commits on a given branch, but, e.g., if the branch was created as synonymous with another branch, the commits often have nothing to do with “who created it”. For instance if I do git push origin master:newbranch then the branch I just created on the remote has, as its most recent commit, the same most-recent commit as master, which is not necessarily “mine”.)

The output from git fetch --all does show activity by default, though. For instance:

$ git fetch --all
Fetching origin
Fetching rohan
From [redacted]
   55f37f2..dc439fc  master     -> rohan/master

This says that I’ve just updated my idea of rohan/master based on stuff I brought over from the remote I named “rohan”. Nothing was updated in origin/*.