How to manage heads on a remote repository?

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

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