I track a bunch of upstream Git repositories, where by 'track' I mean that I keep a local copy and update it periodically. By now I have enough of these tracking repositories that updating them all with a straightforward 'git pull --ff-only' (sometimes through an alias) is increasingly noisy, with too much output. This is especially so for the most active repositories, such as my copy of the Linux kernel; a normal 'git pull' on the Linux kernel can easily produce more than a hundred lines of output (sometimes several hundred). Over the past week I've been trying to hunt around in Git to reduce the amount of normal output, with only some success.

The two obvious steps I've taken are to set the 'git fetch' output to its compact mode with 'git config fetch.output compact' and, for some very active repositories, to turn off diffstat output (which lists files modified, added, and removed) with 'git config merge.stat off'. However, this is still relatively verbose in two areas. First, for all repositories you get the four standard lines of 'remote:' messages that report the progress of the fetch. Second, for some repositories, I get a churn of branches being created and pruned.

As far as I know, there's no way to turn off only the remote progress reporting short of feeding standard output and standard error from 'git pull' (or a direct 'git fetch') through a pipe to, say, cat. You can silence everything with 'git fetch -q' but that's potentially quite extreme; in many repositories I want to know about new tags and new branches because they're important markers of things happening. If I was willing to lose those, I could get a very minimal output with 'get fetch -q && git pull', which produces either 'Already up to date' or two lines of 'Updating ...' and 'Fast-forward'.

Knowing that an update happened is important in some repositories, because I'll then go read the commit messages. In others, it's just noise (although at two lines, tolerable noise). This surfaces the small issue that I'm not actually sure what I want in quiet 'git pull' output, and it's almost certainly different in different repositories. I interact quite differently with my copy of the Linux kernel than I do with, say, my copy of OpenZFS on Linux.