Local branch shown ahead of remote branch after rebasing

Question

Every time I rebase my local branch, git status shows something like this:

# On branch --blah--
# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/--blah--' by 11 commits.

Only after I push to the branch (which doesn't push anything actually) it says Everything up-to-date .

This is strange behavior, and I suspect there is something fundamental that I'm missing. Why this is happening?

Answer 1

What git rebase origin/branch does is to put your work on top of the origin/branch branch in your local copy.

when you have:

local_branch: 1--2--3--4--1'--2'--3'
remote_branch: 1--2--3--4--a--b--c 

then by issuing git rebase remote_branch you end up with

local_branch: 1--2--3--4--a--b--c--1'--2'--3'
remote_branch: 1--2--3--4--a--b--c 

which means that currently your local_branch is indeed some commits ahead of the remote that you rebased on.

after that a git push will result in

local_branch: 1--2--3--4--a--b--c--1'--2'--3'
remote_branch: 1--2--3--4--a--b--c--1'--2'--3'

so your local will then be up to date

Check out the git-rebase doc