Beman Dawes writes:

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?

Branches and tags are refs (seen in .git/refs/heads and .git/refs/tags respectively). They can be referred to by their shorthand name (e.g. "master") or their fully-elaborated path ("refs/heads/master") A "hidden ref" is a branch with a non-standard path, under refs/ but not under refs/heads/ So, to hide a remote branch, you might: git push origin <thebranch>:refs/hidden/<thebranch> # create non-std ref git push origin :<thebranch> # delete the old ref There are various tools around for making this kind of stuff easier, e.g., I have this in my .gitconfig for *local* hiding: [alias] hide = "!f() { git update-ref refs/hidden/$1 $1 && git branch -D $1; }; f" unhide = "!f() { git branch $1 && git update-ref $1 refs/hidden/$1; }; f" hidden = "!f() { git show-ref | grep hidden; }; f" Also, see .https://github.com/csonto/git-private HTH, Dave