[stolee]

Earlier this year, we considered similar changes to the ahead/behind calculation in 'git status'. We concluded that there is no good way to provide partial information. Specifically, you can't say "10 ahead" without walking everything you are behind to find all merge-bases. That "10" you found could become smaller by walking more of the other set. We instead opted to not calculate that information as often.

Here is my reply to the thread on-list that summarizes why I think this direction is futile: https://public-inbox.org/git/20180108154822.54829-1-git@jeff...

This ahead/behind calculation is in a lot of places, including 'git fetch' where it checks if each ref update was a forced update (checks if the new ref value has the old ref value in its history). For our version of Git that ships with GVFS, we added an option to skip this check, providing a significant speedup to users fetch times: https://github.com/Microsoft/git/commit/9616c7da3141f539a425...