Re: [boost] [git] Are we free to delete old branches?

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 7:23 AM, Daniel James wrote:

On 8 December 2013 12:09, John Maddock wrote:

...

I notice most of my stuff is littered with old branches, most of which have nothing to do with the library in question (or are even related to old CVS branches).

Are we free to delete these old branches without effecting any other lib?

Is it a good/bad idea? Seems to be recommended practice in Git to delete branches once they're no longer needed?

David Abrahams suggested creating 'hidden' refs for old branches and then deleting them.

I just tried this in unordered:

git update-ref refs/hidden/svn-branches/b2 origin/svn-branches/b2 git push origin 'refs/hidden/*' git push origin :svn-branches/b2

I think it worked okay - my local mirror picked up the hidden ref. Does this look right? It shouldn't be too hard to script.

I tried to read http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Git-References to educate myself enough to understand what you (and Dave) are talking about, but my eyes glazed over within a few sentences. Could you please give a very simple sentence describing what a "hidden ref" is and what is accomplished by creating one? Thanks, --Beman