deleting branches

[Andrew Farmer]

Note the colon before the name... that is what causes the remote
branch to be deleted. My understanding is that you are literally
pushing a void local branch over the remote branch, which effectively
deletes it.

Since Git 1.7, I believe you can also:

git push origin --delete origin/wip/new-flatten-skolems-Aug14

which is just sugar for what Herbert said.

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 11:00 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel
<hvriedel at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2014-09-10 at 11:53:05 +0200, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:
>> I accidentally created a branch (in the main repo) called
>>                origin/origin/wip/new-flatten-skolems-Aug14
>> I was trying to make a local branch to track the existing
>> origin/wip/new-flatten-skolems-Aug14, but only succeeded in creating a
>> local branch called origin/wip/new-flatten-skolems-Aug14, which I then
>> pushed, creating the one above.
>> It's quite confusing to me that branches (listed with git branch -av) have names like
>>                wip/rae
>> and
>>                remotes/origin/wip/rae
>> I suspect that the "remotes/origin" part isn't really part of the name
>> of the branch at all, even though it is not syntactically
>> distinguished.
>
>
>> Anyway, I'd like to delete that branch from the main repo on the
>> server, but I don't know how to do so.  I tried
>
> Here's the problem: you are not allowed to delete anything outside the
> "wip/" namespace (partly because we don't want you do delete a branch
> like "ghc-7.8" or "master", and partly because the submodule gitlink
> integrity check assumes that all branches outside "wip/" are to exist
> forever)
>
> however, here's how you'd usually delete that *remote* branch, if you
> were allowed to (and what I've just done for you, as I have the
> necessary perms being an Git admin):
>
>    git push origin :origin/wip/new-flatten-skolems-Aug14
>
>
> 'git branch -D' deletes only your local branches
>
>
> In the future, we will restrict the ability to create new branches
> outside the "wip/" namespace to avoid such mistakes
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