Git-svn: Bulk removing orphaned remote branches

Question

A project in SVN I'm working on (via git-svn) has frequently-created branches that are then --reintegrated with trunk, and then deleted.

Right now the project has about 10 branches that have not been deleted, but in git, git branch -r shows about 50.

I can remove these one at a time, checking whether they still exist in the svn repository but it's slow and tedious. Is there a way to sync my list of git remote branches with the svn repo?

Answer 1

This is a quick-n-dirty solution I made in a few minutes. It makes use of nice regex patterns that are not available everywhere.

This grabs a clean list of branches. I remove formatting spaces at the beginning of each line, and I'm ignoring tags for now:

git branch -r | sed 's|^[[:space:]]*||' | grep -v '^tags/' > git-branch-list

I grab a similar list of branches from svn, again removing formatting and trailing forward-slashes:

svn ls svn://path/to/branch/dir/ | sed 's|^[[:space:]]*||' | sed 's|/$||' > svn-branch-list

I diff the lists, find the lines that don't exist in the svn list anymore, remove the diff formatting, get rid of the "trunk" branch (which is a git-svn convenience) and save the results to a new list:

diff -u git-branch-list svn-branch-list | grep '^-' | sed 's|^-||' | grep -v '^trunk$' | grep -v '^--' > old-branch-list

Now I just perform standard branch removal procedures for git-svn:

for i in `cat old-branch-list`; do git branch -d -r "$i"; rm -rf .git/svn/refs/remotes/"$i"; done

There's probably better ways of doing this, but it works. Someone else is welcome to take this and improve on it.

Answer 2

In order to get more relevant answer, please state what your branch list looks lie (git branch -a) and which refs you want gone.

In absense of this, i'll just make something up so you can adapt:

Remove the obsolete refs (presumably after manually dropping a remote?):

git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/obsoleteremote/ |
    xargs -n 1 git update-ref -d

Garbage collect all unreferenced objects with

git gc --prune=now

or if your git-gc is not new enough to support arguments to --prune, use

git repack -ad; git prune

Answer 3

Here's my solution. Need to replace trailing slashes used by Subversion in branch names and leading spaces in Git branch listing. The IFS should handle spaces within the branch names themselves.

cd $git_repo  
IFS="$(printf '\n')"; diff <(for i in `git branch -r`; do echo "$i" | sed 's/^  //g'; done | sort) <(for i in `svn ls http://host/my/svn/dir/branches`; do echo "$i" | sed 's/\/$//g'; done | sort) | grep '<' | cut -d' ' -f2 | xargs /usr/bin/git branch -r -d