What does the behind/ahead column mean in the branch view

[brieucdesoutter]

On 1 of the repo I work, one of the feature branch behind/ahead column says 41/36 (aka 36 ahead and 41 behind). The branch has been merged so I would assume the branch should be behind....

So my questions are:

-What does the behind/ahead column mean ?

- How a branch can be both behing and ahead of another branch ?

Thanks for your help

[Rob Simpson]

The OP said "The branch has been merged" so I would think the branch should no longer be "Ahead" of the master branch. We have the same issue. The branch has already been merged but it says the branch is still multiple commits "Ahead" of the master branch. When I go to Create a Pull Request, it says "There are no changes. No commits on BranchName that aren't on master." and will not let me click on the "Create pull request" button.

[tobiasbischof]

same problem here. 

E.g. I merge /develop into /master. After that, my develop branch is 1 behind master (expected) but still many commits ahead. Creating a new PR from /develop to /master shows me all previous changes again in the description although no files are changed.. 

[Mikael Sandberg]

Hi @brieucdesoutter,

Welcome to Atlassian Community.

What the the behind/ahead column is telling you that you have made changes on your branch that has not yet made it to the default branch (the branch Bitbucket is comparing against), meaning your branch is ahead. If there are changes on the default branch that has not yet made it into your branch, then it means your branch is behind the default branch. A branch can be both ahead and behind at the same time if you have made changes to your branch, and someone else have made changes on the default branch that you have not merged into your branch yet. 

[Aquib Mir]

I have a branch with 6 commits, and it shows 4 commits behind master in Bitbucket Cloud. If I click Sync now, what will happen?

In my local repo, when I run git status, both master and branch are up to date with origin/master and origin/branch, respectively.

[Mikael Sandberg]

@Aquib Mir this should be its own question, and you could reference this on in it.

Anyways, when you click sync it will only sync your local branch to your remote branch. The 4 commits behind master just means that your branch is out of sync with the master, and you should do a merge from master to your branch in order to get the latest changes from master into your branch. When you do this merge depends, I have always recommended my users that do merges from master/dev to their branches often and early, that way you will avoid having to make major changes on your branch at the end.

[David Cook]

Clear as mud!