Side effects on a periodic git fetch

Question

Let's say i have a code like this:

git fetch &&  git diff origin origin/master --quiet || echo "untracked"

And i want it to run periodically. Let's say, once a second, or once per five seconds and so on.

If this code outputs "untracked", or in other words, if there is an update on the remote,i will run a git pull to update the local code.

Question is: Is it bad to do something like this? I mean, i know that it would be a constant request on the remote server. But, is it bad? And apart from that, is there any other side effects? Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Beside making other commands fail if executed too often, then main drawback of a regular fetch is on the push --force-with-lease.

I have documented as much in "push --force-with-lease by default"

--force-with-lease or --force-with-lease=<refname> interacts very badly with anything that implicitly runs git fetch on the remote to be pushed to in the background, e.g. git fetch origin on your repository in a cronjob.

The protection it offers over --force is ensuring that subsequent changes your work wasn't based on aren't clobbered, but this is trivially defeated if some background process is updating refs in the background.