Local git clone clean up

[Geert Janssens]

I'm writing this mostly as a references for other devs...

After John's recent cleanups in branches and tags I noticed my local git clone was still keeping 
references to some branches and tags that are not longer in the public git repository. So I set 
out to clean this up.

The most radical approach would be to remove my local clone and reclone the public repository. 
That would certainly ensure full synchronisation, but I would also loose my local branches.

So in the end I did this:

- To remove all references to deleted remote branches in the public repository:

git fetch -p

Nice and easy.

- Then I noticed that all the remote branches were in my list twice, once as "remotes/origin/xyz" 
and once as "remotes/xyz". The former are the references to the remote public git repository. 
The latter I'm not really sure about. I guess they are leftovers from a remote I have removed at 
some point or from the svn-git bridge we used to have.

git branch -d remotes/xyz
gives an error, as does
git branch -d xyz
(assuming xyz does not exist as a local branch, but in that case this is not the command to use 
anyway)

So to get rid of those I went directly into the hidden .git directory and manually removed these 
branch references:

cd .git/refs/remotes
rm *

Note that this will print a warning that "origin" can't be deleted because it's a directory. That's 
precisely what I wanted because I want to keep the references to the "origin" repository. If you 
want to play on the safe side, you are advised to delete the references in .git/refs/remotes one 
by one, verifying each time if the correct branch reference has been deleted.

- Lastly I found there were still a lot of tags in my repository that were not (or no longer) in the 
remote public repository. I haven't manually added any tags in my repository so they must be 
the result of tags that got deleted remotely. It turns out that "git fetch -t -p" doesn't prune 
deleted tags. In order to fix this I again used brute force: I first deleted *all* tags from my local 
repository and then imported the tags from the remote repository:

for tag in $(git tag); do git tag -d "$tag"; done
git fetch -t --all

Only do this if you never created tags yourself or don't care losing your private tags !

The end result is a nice clean local clone with all my private branches still available...

Cheers,

Geert