[dooglius]

The expectation is that the information you get is up-to-date as of the time you started the status command, yes there can be a race in the time it takes to present information to your terminal but that's a small time window. This more or less means you want to fetch, yes. Two Generals problem is only applicable on the remote side, which may keep sending retransmits for a while, if it doesn't get acks that you received its data (which isn't the client's problem). If the client doesn't get data from the server presumably the right behavior (which I'd expect happens now with fetch) is to hang and print an error after a timeout.

[civopsec]

> The expectation is that the information you get is up-to-date as of the time you started the status command,

Why is that the expectation of a “distributed VCS”?

[happytoexplain]

It is not - it is the expectation of the phrase "up to date". You don't have to alter reality, you can just alter the description of reality to be a little more conversationally precise.

[fragmede]

That's your expectation, but how does that work without Internet access? You're holding it wrong...

[happytoexplain]

It's pretty presumptuous to just tell somebody what they think about English is wrong. We can change the wording without changing the system (Though technically we could even alter the system to update the remote ref as part of the status command, and the wording would be much better to a human! Though we shouldn't, since, as you imply, we don't want the status command to be dependent on a network call.)

Edit: Removed accusation of "Conflating the implementation of the system with the wording of its output".