Re: renaming remote branches

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:27:31PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:

I can "rename" a remote branch by doing:

   git push REMOTE REMOTE/OLD:refs/heads/NEW
   git push REMOTE :OLD

is there any better way to do this (I mean, er... more
user-friendly/less-dangerous/... I dunno... "better" :-)?

No, the git protocol doesn't know about moving refs at all, so you are
stuck with creation and deletion (and the creation, as you noticed, is
even more painful because we don't guess that "NEW" is going to be a
branch, so you are stuck saying "refs/heads/").

Not only is this not user-friendly, but it does not preserve any branch
config or reflog at the remote (both things that "branch -m" does).

In your situation, I would probably do:

  ssh remote-host 'cd remote-dir && git branch -m OLD NEW'

but that is not always an option, depending on your setup.

Also, I note that the old name ("OLD") remains in .git/info/refs, both
locally and in the remote; is this a problem?  I can update the local
.git/info/refs by running "git update-server-info", but I'm not sure how
to do in for the remote repo without having a login there...

If you are not sharing your repo over a dumb transport (like http), then
the contents of .git/info/refs shouldn't matter. If you are, then you
should enable the post-update hook to run update-server-info after every
push (i.e., it is not just the deletion that is a problem, but none of
your pushes is being marked in .git/info/refs).

-Peff