Re: Deleting remote branch pointed by remote HEAD

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org> writes:

> That is, refs/remotes/origin/HEAD is only there to let the user abbreviate 
> the most useful branch of the remote; there's no reason it should reflect 
> the remote's HEAD, except that the remote's HEAD is a good guess if the 
> user hasn't said anything.
>
> 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 agree with you in many of the points in your message.

The user used to be able to say "origin" as a shorthand for "origin/frotz"
by having "remotes/origin/HEAD" locally, and somebody (not necessarily the
user himself) broke this arrangement.  Silently discarding HEAD will lose
the information on which remote branch was the interesting one for the
user.  It may also change the disambiguation rules for "origin" without
telling the user.  Neither is desirable.

The tool needs a better explanation of the situation.  We also want an
easier way to help the user repoint the HEAD to something else, or remove
the dangling HEAD than telling him to use symbolic-ref.