How to make GitHub treat orphan branch as orphan branch (not suggest pull requests or inform it's ahead and behind)?

[runevision]

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I have three branches in my repo:

• main
• upm
• gh-pages

Both upm and gh-pages are orphan branches, that is, there is no shared history between any of the branches in the repo. This is as it should be.

However, at the top of the page for the upm branch, GitHub will show the info:

This branch is 6 commits ahead of, 5 commits behind main.

Whereas for the gh-pages branch it shows no such information, even though this branch too is both ahead and behind main.

To be clear, the information is irrelevant and confusing for others who visit the page, so I don't want it to be shown.

Apparently, GitHub knows to not show this info for the gh-pages branch. How can I make it also not show it for the upm branch?

• Is there some kind of branch setting or way to tell GitHub how the branch is used which will make it be treated differently in the interface?
• Is the reason that the gh-pages branch is deployed via GitHub actions and GitHub infers it should be treated differently in the UI for this reason?
• Or is it just a hardcoded rule in GitHub to treat branches called "gh-pages" differently?

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[runevision]

This is still an issue and there is still no resolution.

[jessesuen]

We are facing this issue as well. My experiments in akuity/kargo#2406 seem to indicate GitHub conditionally shows or hides the This branch is X commits ahead of, Y commits behind main. message depending on if the branch in question is literally named gh-pages. I'm not aware of any configuration or well-known files in git to configure this, unfortunately.

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[endorh]

This is still an issue and there's no resolution.

I have encountered this problem a few times too, and my guess is GitHub has a hardcoded rule based on the branch name.

To be honest, rather than a repository-level setting, I think the optimal solution here would be if PRs were never suggested between branches with no common history. You would still be able to create a PR, but something as unnatural as pulling changes from an orphan branch shouldn't be suggested.

In my case, I use GH Actions in some of my repositories to maintain a parallel history of my main branch's history in an orphan branch with generated intermediate outputs that are worth keeping versioned for reference.

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[fabi1an]

+1

[asaikali]

+1

[jmason888]

+1
This is silly; all it needs is a flag to indicate that a branch is orphan. Or, you know, see if it has any commit history in common with the default branch at all.