Re: git merging

[Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>]

On Fri, Jun 17 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> [ 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:
> > 
> > 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.

That worked! Thanks.

> 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.

Yeah that's very handy. I love the way the branches work, with just the
sha in the file name. So easy to manipulate.

-- 
Jens Axboe