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Comment by larusso | Hacker News Reader

Good stuff here. But I don‘t like the auto pruning suggestion as a reasonable global default. Or at least this shows that users who really see this as useful see no real difference between git and let’s say SVN. The whole idea is that the system is distributed and that you don‘t follow blind another upstream. But I grant the fact that most projects are not developed like the Linux kernel for which git was created. But there is another issue. I personally like the fact that I keep a history of old branches etc. This can also save me if I or another person in the team deletes a branch by accident. I assume that pruning would maybe not delete the objects right away. Need to check that.

What would actually happen if I have a branch under development and it gets deleted from remote? Will it remove locally for me then? I guess only when my local head is equal to what remote pointed to.

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Because Git is distributed, there's no "a branch" foo or whatever; that's a very pointedly centralized-logic, non-DVCS way to treat Git. If Alice has a head named "foo", Bob can fetch Alice as a remote and get a remote-tracking head "alice/foo", which has no bearing on any head named "foo" Bob has; it's just a view of Alice's state.

You can see why you'd want to prune these on fetch, if you want your refs/remotes/alice state to mirror Alice's state; this means removing "alice/foo" if "foo" on Alice is removed. You also might not want to, that's fine. But if you use git fetch as though Git were a DVCS, this is exactly the natural behavior; it's only when you imagine Git is centralized that it starts seeming strange.

So the answer to your final question is "this is not how distributed VCSes work".

(Just don't ask about tags. Ugh, what a nightmare! To be fair, the idea is that you don't go around fetching tags.)

"What would actually happen if I have a branch under development and it gets deleted from remote?"

The remote reference would be deleted but your local one would not, and you could push your local right back up to the remote if you want. Pruning is totally safe.

Ok. Was late yesterday. I reread the passage and understood it wrong. Yes if it keeps the „tracking“ branch information in sync that’s ok. I assumed it autocleans local branches. The initial statement regarding history etc kept me off track.

Yea, I enabled those without thinking through all of my use cases and I lost some archived data I didn't intend to. I definitely should've been doing a better job of maintaining those archives, but definitely not an option for everyone.

I had the same thought, I got an alias set up in my ~/.gitconfig to clean up branches that gets deleted from remote when I'm ready

`gone = !git branch -vv | awk '/: gone]/{print $1}' | xargs git branch -D`

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