Re: [PATCH/RFC] improve no-op push output

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

I noticed the mention of the "Everything up-to-date" message in a nearby
thread. This patch doesn't help with the case there, but it made me
think about how vague that message is.

-- >8 --
When a push is a no-op because all refs are up-to-date, we print
"Everything up-to-date". That is reasonable when push.default is
"matching" (or when a wildcard refspec is given), because "Everything"
pretty obviously means "everything you asked git to push".

But when one of the single-ref push.default modes is used, the
"Everything" is slightly misleading; we only tried to push one thing,
and we should not give the user the impression that the remote is
completely in sync with what is in their local repo.

Instead, let's detect the case that we attempted to push a single ref,
and if so, just show the verbose status table (which includes the
up-to-date ref). We don't want to show it if we tried to push many refs,
because it could be quite long (e.g., in the case of "matching").

---
So before, running:

  git init -q --bare parent &&
  git clone -q parent child 2>/dev/null &&
  cd child &&
  echo one >one && git add one && git commit -q -m one &&
  git branch other &&
  git -c push.default=simple push

would just print:

  Everything up-to-date

and now you get:

  To /tmp/push-message/parent
   = [up to date]      master -> master

which is much more informative.

I think a more interesting case is to do this in the child:

	git checkout other
        git -c push.default=matching push

after the above sequence.  It will try to push master to master (and
the most important part is 'other' is not involved in this push at
all) and would give you the same updated message, which would make
it more clear that 'other' is not involved.  Although it by itself
is good, but unless you are paying attention, you may not catch that
your current branch is *not* listed in the output, so it might not
help people that much, even if they weren't on a detached HEAD.

Somebody who is unaware that she has been working on detached HEAD
is by definition very unlikely to notice that the 'master' in the
output is different from her current branch, as she is not paying
attention to what branch she is working on.

It might be a better approach to check if the set of pushed refs
include the current branch and rephrase the message only in that
case, perhaps

	Everything up-to-date (the current branch not pushed)

or something.