Getting rid of a stale remote?

Hello Everyone,

I'm trying to get rid of a stale remote. I deleted the remote via `git remote rm <remote>` and that removed it from .git/config but for some reason the references stayed in the listing of `git branch -a`.

How do I get rid of the listing in `git branch`?

See `git remote prune`.

-- Ram

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

From the remote man page:

I'm unclear as to how this solves my problem.  Consider the following:

    $ git remote
    a
    b
    c
    $ git branch -a
    a
    b
    c
    remotes/a/branch
    remotes/b/branch
    remotes/c/branch
    remotes/d/branch
    $ git remote prune d
    fatal: 'd' does not appear to be a git repository
    fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
    $ git remote rm d
    error: Could not remove config section 'remote.d'

I would like to get rid of the `remotes/d/branch` entry.

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 02:25:07PM -0400, Tim Visher wrote:

It doesn't. Prune is about removing stale branches of _existing_ remotes, but you want to remove the whole remote.

So you don't have a remote 'd' at this point.

But you do have a crufty tracking branch.

You don't have a remote 'd', so we try to a git repository in the directory 'd'. Which obviously doesn't work.

And this fails because you have no configured remote 'd', just the crufty branch. How you got into that state, I don't know, but I imagine it was from deleting the config in .git/config manually instead of using "git remote rm" in the first place.

It would be tempting to say that "git remote rm" should continue if the config simply doesn't exist and remove the crufty branch, but that is not quite right. We actually need the config to tell us "here is where we store the tracking branches for remote d". Of course, unless you have munged the config manually, it will always be "refs/remotes/d". So we could perhaps guess that for the case of missing config (possibly with "git remote rm -f" or something).

But if you just want to do things manually, try "git branch -d -r d/branch".

-Peff

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

%<---lengthy but almost assuredly misleading explanation of how I got there--->%

So I had this long explanation but I realized that it probably wasn't the case. If I ever run into this again I'll try to be more aware of what I did. I suspect though that it's when I want to make one remote my origin and make origin something else…

That sounds quite sensible to me.  Also, a message along the lines of:

    You are trying to delete a remote for which there is no config section.  (We
    discovered a remote X in refs/remotes/X) and deleted it.|No remote X in
    refs/remotes/X. Did you store it elsewhere?)  In the future, use `git
    remote` to alter your remotes

That did indeed work like a charm.  Thanks so much.