Why git push --quiet produce output?

Question

I'm doing git push with a quiet flag and expect that git will not produce any messages. The documentation says

--quiet Suppress all output, including the listing of updated refs, unless an error occurs. Progress is not reported to the standard error stream.

but I still receive "Branch develop....". Why is that?

> $ git status 
> On branch develop
> Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/develop'.
> nothing to commit, working directory clean
> 
> $ git push --set-upstream origin develop --quiet
> Branch develop set up to track remote branch develop from origin.

Answer 1

It's the --set-upstream that is producing that message. The push is totally quiet. --set-upstream is effectively a call-out to git branch -u upstream/foo. If you want git branch to be silent, you will need to call it yourself, with its own --quiet option.

Answer 2

"git push --quiet --set-upstream``"^(man) was not, indeed, quiet when setting the upstream branch configuration.

That has been corrected with Git 2.32 (Q2 2021).

See commit f3cce89 (15 Apr 2021) by Øystein Walle (Osse).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit a819e2b, 30 Apr 2021)}

transport: respect verbosity when setting upstream

^{Signed-off-by: Øystein Walle}

A command such as git push^(man) -qu origin feature will print "Branch 'feature' set up to track remote branch 'feature' from 'origin'." even when --quiet is passed.
In this case it's because install_branch_config() is always called with BRANCH_CONFIG_VERBOSE.

struct transport keeps track of the desired verbosity.
Fix the above issue by passing BRANCH_CONFIG_VERBOSE conditionally based on that.

This should now be actually quiet:

git push --quiet -u --no-progress upstream main