Subject: Re: [PATCH v25 2/2] status: show comparison with push remote tracking branch

From: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:31:41 +0000

On 13/01/2026 17:03, Jeff King wrote:
> 
> Can we make this configurable?
> 
> I build my daily driver off of the 'jch' branch, which now includes this
> series, and I've found that for my triangular workflow the ahead/behind
> for the push branch is just useless noise. I treat my push destination
> like a mirror, where I always just push up everything at the end of the
> day.

This is a slight tangent but if we're taking about making things 
configurable I've never found the actual values of the ahead/behind 
numbers particularly useful. In a triangular workflow all I'm really 
interested in is whether (a) my local branch is behind the upstream 
branch and if so is it going to be a pig to rebase it, and (b) my local 
branch matches the push branch (i.e. do I need to run "git push"). I 
don't really care exactly how many commits ahead or behind the local 
branch is, the counts are just distracting and don't really answer the 
"is it going to be a pig to rebase" question - the only way to answer 
that is to try it and see.

So as well as configuring whether we show the comparison the push branch 
it would be nice to be able to configure a simpler output as well. That 
does not need to be part of this series but perhaps we should design the 
configuration to be extendable.

Thanks

Phillip

> I know that the output can be disabled with status.aheadbehind, but:
> 
>    1. I noticed this first via "git checkout", which does not have such a
>       flag (AFAIK).
> 
>    2. That flag would also disable the upstream branch ahead/behind
>       output, which I do find useful.
> 
> -Peff
>