Hi, Sorry for the delay. Got a little busy over the weekend. I seem to have found the reason behind the issue in the mean time :-) On Wed, 2018-09-26 at 10:05 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Duy Nguyen <pclouds@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 05:24:14PM +0200, Duy Nguyen wrote: > > > On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 6:46 AM Kaartic Sivaraam > > > <kaartic.sivaraam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > This is the most interesting part of the issue. I **did not** run > > > > 'git fetch ...' in between those cat commands. I was surprised by > > > > how the contents of FETCH_HEAD are changing without me spawning any > > > > git processes that might change it. Am I missing something here? As > > > > far as i could remember, there wasn't any IDE running that might > > > > automatically spawn git commands especially in that work > > > > tree. Weird. > > > > Maybe something like this could help track down that rogue "git fetch" > > process (it's definitely _some_ process writing to the wrong file; or > > some file synchronization thingy is going on). You can log more of > > course, but this is where FETCH_HEAD is updated. > Thanks for the patch! It really helped me identify the issue. The actual culprit here doesn't seem to be Git itself. It was the "git- prompt" bash plug-in[1] I was using. It seems to be spawning "git fetch" for every command I type on shell. That answers why the FETCH_HEAD was being updated even though I wasn't explicitly running it. The git bash plug-in seems to be fetching changes for *all* the upstream branches. That answers why there FETCH_HEAD was populated with info about all the branches when I explicitly requested for the next branch. I've also verified that `git fetch origin next` works as intended (FETCH_HEAD has info only about orgin/next) when I turn-off the plug-in which confirms that it's the culprit. A cursory search found me a related issue[2] but I'm not sure if it's the exact same one. I could identify the culprit only with the help of Duy's patch. Thanks Duy! Sorry for not realising this earlier. I almost forgot I'm using it as I've been accustomed to it a lot. > Well, a background-ish thing could be some vendor-provided copy of > Git that has nothing to do with what Kaartic would be compiling with > this patch X-<. Fortunately, it wasn't the case here as the plug-in was using my manually-built version of Git :-) Thanks for the help! Tag-line: Sometimes tools become part of our workflow so much that we really don't realise their presence. It's an indication of a good tool but we should be aware of suspecting them when an issue arises! Something which I should have done to realise the issue ealier x-< References: [1]: https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt [2]: https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt/issues/125 Thanks, Sivaraam
