why does it say “Your branch is ahead of origin/master by 857 commits” when I need to *pull* origin master

Question

Firstly, I\'m aware of a number of similarly worded questions, eg:

• How can I find the location of origin/master in git, and how do I change it?
• git:

Answer 1

You are over thinking this. The message isn't saying the remote is behind. It's saying your local repository's recorded commit for 'origin/master' is. At no point in generating that message did git communicate with a remote. It simply looked into the .git directory, and returned the contents of .git/refs/remotes/origin/master. Try it yourself. Both of these commands should return the same thing from the top-level of the repository:

cat .git/refs/remotes/origin/master
git rev-parse origin/master

The second command is simply a plumbing command for finding the 'origin/master' pointer. You could replace 'origin/master' with any branch to get the most recent commit on that branch.

That message is telling you is that your local 'master' is ahead of the commit returned by 'git rev-parse origin/master' by 857 commits. How did this situation arise? I can't say exactly, but I'd put considerable money on you accidentally merging a different branch into 'master'. Every time I've seen this problem, it's a bad merge from user error.

First, issue git fetch origin to make sure that 'origin/master' pointer is up-to-date. Then, study your git log. Look for something recent you don't expect. Download a program like tig or use gitk to get a visual graph of your commit history. It's a good bet you accidentally issued git pull stable while checked out on 'master'. Or something similar.