Re: how to rename remote branches, the long way

On 2021-04-24 at 00:22:06, Antoine Beaupré wrote:

For local branches, that doesn't matter much: no "links" should point
there. But git repos are, nowadays, living web sites on web servers like
GitHub, GitLab, cgit, or whatever. You have no way of telling those
sites "I am renaming a branch", so they don't have an opportunity of
fixing broken links (and, incidentally, bypassing branch protection,
although I actually use the GitLab API to workaround that problem).

So I wonder: could git remote branch renames as an operation on remotes?
How would that look? Is that something that the git project should work
on? Or is this something strictly reserved to the API space of git
forges? In that case, how do I tell my gitolite server that it's okay
to rename a branch since it doesn't have an API? :)

I think the ability to rename a branch, and to update the HEAD reference
(and other symrefs) would be a nice protocol extension to add.  I've
considered doing this in the past, but have never gotten around to it.
It's definitely a feature I'd like to see.

Or, maybe, should this script be sent as a [PATCH] instead and just be
merged into git itself? Maybe in contrib/? I do see some Python in
there, so I don't feel too much like an heretic... Obviously, it could
be rewritten in C, but it would feel such a pain in the back to me... I
already rewrote it from this shell script, which is still available
here:

In general, Git tries to remain neutral on forges and therefore we're
probably not super likely to adopt tooling that's specific to a set of
forges.  I do, of course, think this script has utility and serves a
particular need for users, even though it's not likely that Git will
host it itself.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US