Re: Deleting remote branch pointed by remote HEAD

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Jan 21, 2009, 19:50 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.1.00.0901211443140.19665@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090121191408.GA22958@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Jeff King wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 02:12:19PM -0500, Jeff King wrote:
> 
> > > I think it might be more appropriate to just care less about a broken 
> > > symref, explain what's wrong if the user actually tries to use it, and 
> > > otherwise mostly ignore it.
> > 
> > I thought about that, but I still wonder if deleting it when the
> > pointed-to ref is deleted might be more convenient. Remember that
> > "refs/remotes/$foo/HEAD" can be accessed by a shorthand "$foo". So that
> > means it can impact ref ambiguity lookup. I guess the chance of that
> > happening is fairly unlikely, though.
> 
> Not to mention that even without others refs with matching names, it is
> probably nicer to the user who does try to access it via "$foo" to
> simply say "there is no $foo" rather than a confusing error message
> about a deleted branch that they have to manually fix. And that is
> easily accomplished by deleting such a bogus symref.

I think the ideal thing is to keep the symref as a reminder and just give a non-confusing error message instead of a confusing one. E.g.:

""" $foo is set to mean the tracking branch $foo/bar, which does not exist. Use:

  git remote set-default $foo <name>

to set a new default branch for $foo. """

(And, of course, add that subcommand to remote)
	-Daniel
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