Question

I’ve been using git-svn for a while (everyone else on my team has been using svn directly). We decided that we will all start using git. In order to do this, I used the git repo that is my “side” of git-svn like such:

$ git remote add origin [e-mail]:mycompany/myproject.git
$ git push -u origin master

This went fine, but when the process was complete I had retained all these ridiculous branches that git-svn had created when I first started using it, with one little kink; git would no longer even acknowledge that they were branches. Here’s what my list looked like:

$ git branch -r
domain_integration
dot-org
dot-org@1977
email-edit-page
origin/account-integration
origin/master
origin/stable
prototype_to_jquery-1.1.0
stable@1976
tags/development-1.1.0.0
tags/pre-2011-02-08
tags/production-1.0
tags/stable-1.0.0
tags/stable-1.0.1
tags/stable-1.1.0
tags/stable-1.1.0.1
trunk-stash

These were annoying, though I knew where they came from (mostly), but now I can’t even delete them. This happens:

$ git branch -d trunk-stash
error: branch 'trunk-stash' not found.

I was able to fix some of these by going into .git/refs/remotes and just deleting them, but there were only a few there. The only other place i can find them is in .git/info/refs. Which looks something like the following:

...
7788d300f0d4370d65a3ccf3e47d90f7fb16b0b4        refs/remotes/tags/stable-1.0.0
aace34d6745080ce2b6b29e927f5d1b050b99511        refs/remotes/tags/stable-1.0.1
58bd2ac23d5979ff61bd6305df18f8a5da50f888        refs/remotes/tags/stable-1.1.0
644fd55fcdf2569305cdbe0b6fefb9f247625658        refs/remotes/tags/stable-1.1.0.1
bc8e9f9177c9612aceb55624adea1b02e9e8620f        refs/remotes/trunk
69493e14345e6a7a4db324935bccd6393f201da4        refs/remotes/trunk-stash
25b7024f6c1d38c10400b2c2e7b446aae1e84e06        refs/stash
...

I assume this is just associated the branches with their last commits. Does it make sense to delete the “fake” ones? Will this break something? (Will it work?)

Answer 1

If you only want the master branch you can always delete the local repo and re-clone it. That’s the easiest if you don’t care about anything but the master branch. You can always try:

git remote prune origin

To get rid of remote references that are no longer in origin but kept locally.