Re: renaming remote branches

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 16, 2009, 06:59 UTC
Message-ID: <20090416065934.GA20071@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <buo3ac9jn18.fsf@dhlpc061.dev.necel.com>

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:27:31PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> I can "rename" a remote branch by doing:
> 
>    git push REMOTE REMOTE/OLD:refs/heads/NEW
>    git push REMOTE :OLD
> 
> is there any better way to do this (I mean, er... more
> user-friendly/less-dangerous/... I dunno... "better" :-)?

No, the git protocol doesn't know about moving refs at all, so you are stuck with creation and deletion (and the creation, as you noticed, is even more painful because we don't guess that "NEW" is going to be a branch, so you are stuck saying "refs/heads/").

Not only is this not user-friendly, but it does not preserve any branch config or reflog at the remote (both things that "branch -m" does).

In your situation, I would probably do:

  ssh remote-host 'cd remote-dir && git branch -m OLD NEW'

but that is not always an option, depending on your setup.

> Also, I note that the old name ("OLD") remains in .git/info/refs, both
> locally and in the remote; is this a problem?  I can update the local
> .git/info/refs by running "git update-server-info", but I'm not sure how
> to do in for the remote repo without having a login there...

If you are not sharing your repo over a dumb transport (like http), then the contents of .git/info/refs shouldn't matter. If you are, then you should enable the post-update hook to run update-server-info after every push (i.e., it is not just the deletion that is a problem, but none of your pushes is being marked in .git/info/refs).

-Peff