From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 03:31:34 GMT
Subject: Re: [BUG?] git fetch -p -t prunes all non-tag refs
Message-ID: <20110927033134.GB8534@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1317079692.5579.19.camel@centaur.lab.cmartin.tk>

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 01:28:09AM +0200, Carlos Martín Nieto wrote:

> > term I think we should fix it properly. We are already learning "what are
> > the refs the remote side currently has" from the transport and the right
> > fix ought to be to use that original information, not the version filtered
> > for the use of the primary objective of fetch, which is to only fetch what
> > the user asked for.
> 
> Do you mean that we should ignore the refspec? Or do you mean that we
> should look at the refspec if it exists, and only consider deleting
> those that meet the refspec, so that `--prune --tags` would only delete
> tags that don't exist in the remote?

The latter. If I say:

  git fetch --prune origin refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

and refs/heads/master doesn't exist on the remote, I would expect
refs/remotes/origin/master to be deleted locally. And that naturally
extends to:

  git fetch --prune origin refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

We do something similar with "git push --mirror", which does pruning
like this[1].

-Peff

[1] Actually, I'm not sure how correct "push --mirror" is. It would be
    nice if the prune operation could be split from the mirror, too. In
    the past, I have wanted to do both:

      # backup to a repository where our objects will be shared
      # with other related backups. So we must only use our slice of the
      # ref namespace.
      git push --mirror backup-repo +refs/*:refs/`hostname`/*

    and:

      # update topic branches we have already published (using the
      # "matching" refspec), but remove any that we have deleted
      # locally.
      git push --mirror publish-point +:

    and I don't think either works.