Re: error: refs/remotes/origin/HEAD points nowhere!

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 5, 2008, 21:24 UTC
Message-ID: <7v7iggn9ts.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <200803051338.44938.tlikonen@iki.fi>

Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> After a while I start tracking some other remote repository. I do this:
>
>   git remote add ng git://project-ng/project.git
>
> Then I do "git fetch ng" and probably also "git checkout --track -b 
> master-ng ng/master". Then I find the old "origin" useless to me so I 
> remove it with "git remote rm origin".
>
> It seems that refs/remotes/origin/HEAD is still left in my repository 
> and hence I keep getting these annoying error messages all the time.

> Well, I know how to delete this file, but I believe that git should have
> deleted it when I called "git remote rm origin". Am I right?

Good analysis. I would say "git remote rm" should have removed it and it would be a bug if it didn't.

> What is the purpose of this refs/remotes/origin/HEAD in the first place?

To let you say things like "git diff remotes/origin" as a short-hand for "git diff remotes/origin/master" (or whichever branch 'origin' repository considered the primary one, which is determined when you cloned from it).