Re: ghost refs

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 12:38 PM, John Dlugosz <JDlugosz@tradestation.com> wrote:
> A couple times I've seen people who have some reference
> remotes/origin/foo after foo has been removed from origin.
> What is the proper way to address that, other than removing
> the file directly?  It appears to not go away with a "fetch" even
> though it was deleted from the origin.  So what is the proper way
> to delete something on the origin so the deletion propagates?
> I normally use "git push origin :foo".

This is on purpose, based on the theory that you don't want to lose
data from your local repo just because someone (accidentally?) deletes
a branch on the remote server.  Unfortunately, this theory is a bit
flawed, since someone could just as easily overwrite the remote branch
with a totally different commit, and you'd still lose it in *that*
case.  So mostly it's just confusing.

Anyway, what you want is "git remote prune origin".

Have fun,

Avery