How to manage heads on a remote repository?

I'm currently exploring the idea of not only making the equivalent of "pu" and "next" available on a public repository for one of my projects, but also the topics/* branches. When thinking about how I might do this, one snag I ran into is that the topics/foo and topics/bar branches are ephemeral, and so when I replicate them to a remote repository, either on kernel.org or repo.or.cz, I would need a way of removing a head for a topic branch that had already been merged.

Creating new topics/foo branch or updating is easy; just do a git push, and they will get created on the remote side. I don't see an easy way of deleting a ref on a remote branch, so any automation at the moment looks like it would require me writing my own script and using something like this:

      ssh remote-host git --git-dir=xxx branch -D topics/foo

... which of course wouldn't work repo.or.cz since it requires shell access.

Am I missing anything?

							- Ted