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Re: git merging

From
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date
Jun 17, 2005, 18:50 UTC
Message-ID
<Pine.LNX.4.58.0506171142500.2268@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To
<20050617183914.GX6957@suse.de>
[ Git mailing list cc'd, since this is a general question that maybe 
  others have wondered about ]
On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Jens Axboe wrote:
Show 5 quoted lines
> 
> btw (and forgive me for just asking you), what is the canonical way to
> kill a branch in case you want to redo it? right now I have a block tree
> with a bunch of brances, and I would like to redo one of the branches
> because I forgot to add the signed-off-by entries in there.

You can just simply remove the .git/refs/heads/branch-name file (obviously after having made sure that ".git/HEAD" points to something else), and then you can run "git prune", which will remove all objects that aren't referenced (directly or indirectly) by anything in ".git/refs/**".

Be very very careful, though. "git prune" is a dangerous script, since it will remove objects from the object store. If you had something that you don't have a proper reference for, or if you give "git prune" a list of references manually and it's not complete, "git prune" will happily remove objects that you didn't mean for it to remove.

The "git prune" script is really trivial, you can see for yourself what "git-prune-script" does.

NOTE! It's entirely possible to not actually delete the old branch, but just rename it, and use it as a reference while you build up the new branch with the same contents (but maybe different commit log messages, or maybe just re-ordering the commits in the new version). To rename a branch, just rename the ".git/refs/heads/<branch-name>" file to something else.

So you may decide to remove (and prune) the old branch only after you've re-created a new version of it, for example. That way you can use git itself to extract the contents of the branch you want to re-do, which is often easier.

Btw, if you have a recent version of "gitk" instealled, you can do
	gitk $(ls .git/revs/heads)

and you'll get a full graphical view of _all_ your branches, which can be very instructive.

		Linus
Next: Jens Axboe
Message 1 of 16 in “Re: git merging”
  1. Linus TorvaldsJun 17, 2005
  2. Jens AxboeJun 17, 2005
  3. Jeff GarzikJun 17, 2005
  4. Linus TorvaldsJun 17, 2005
  5. Jeff GarzikJun 17, 2005
  6. Linus TorvaldsJun 18, 2005
  7. Jens AxboeJun 20, 2005
  8. Matthias UrlichsJun 20, 2005
  9. Jens AxboeJun 20, 2005
  10. Linus TorvaldsJun 20, 2005
  11. Daniel BarkalowJun 20, 2005
  12. Matthias UrlichsJun 20, 2005
  13. Jens AxboeJun 20, 2005
  14. Linus TorvaldsJun 20, 2005
  15. Jens AxboeJun 21, 2005
  16. Linus TorvaldsJun 21, 2005

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