From your steps here, in step 6 you commit a change to B's copy of A, but you don't push that change anywhere. So isn't it correct that it has unpushed changes?

I'm a little confused as to what you're saying that Xcode has to do with this, as well.

Comment by David Sweeris (JIRA)

Maybe? I was under the impression that pushing was only involved with remote repositories, and these are all local. I tried telling git to push them, it said, "fatal: The current branch 0.2.0 has no upstream branch.". I took that to mean that there wasn't anywhere to push them to, which, unless I'm misunderstanding something, makes complaining about it kind of a moot point. Is that not the case? I'll have to laugh/SMH at myself a bit if this is just me not having a firm enough grasp on how git works.

Re: Xcode
My mistake. I'd been using Xcode to do edits and commits, and neglected to try to reproduce the issue without involving it. I just tried it again and I get the same behavior doing everything from the command line. So... turns out the Xcode doesn't have anything to do with the matter (nor does step 7).

I believe the point of this error is to keep you from accidentally discarding changes. If you commit a change in your edited package and then don't actually push those changes to a remote repository, your committed changes only live in your local edited repo. If you then unedit, those committed changes will be lost, which likely isn't what you want. So we display this error to prevent you from accidentally blowing away those changes. If you really do want to lose your changes, you can pass the --force option.

Because 0.2.0 is a branch that you created locally, it doesn't know which branch in the remote to track, so you need to set a remote tracking branch before you can push. You can read about how this works at https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Remote-Branches.

You can push to local repos:

sp = swift package

$ sp edit bar --branch bugfix
$ cd Packages/bar
$ git status
On branch bugfix
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

    modified:   Sources/bar.swift
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "test"
[bugfix a21c919] test
 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
$ git remote --v
origin  /private/tmp/BigPackage/bar (fetch)
origin  /private/tmp/BigPackage/bar (push)
$ git push origin bugfix
Counting objects: 4, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 347 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 4 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
To /private/tmp/BigPackage/bar
 * [new branch]      bugfix -> bugfix