Re: git: errors while pushing

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 09:38 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Gil Forcada <gforcada gnome org> wrote:
> > I successfully pushed a translation into gnome-icon-theme but git said:
> ...
> > error: refname 'GNOME_ICON_THEME_2_17_5' is ambiguous
> > error: refname 'GNOME_ICON_THEME_2_17_5' is ambiguous
> ...
> > error: refname 'GNOME_0_30_PATCHES' is ambiguous
> > error: refname 'GNOME_CORE_1_0_7' is ambiguous
> > error: refname 'GNOME_0_30_PATCHES' is ambiguous
> > error: refname 'GNOME_CORE_1_0_7' is ambiguous
> ...
> > error: refname 'gnome-2-0' is ambiguous
> > error: refname 'gnome-2-0' is ambiguous
> 
> None of those are your fault.
> 
> Those are all import errors where deleted SVN branches were apparently
> resurrected (perhaps because they had equivalent tag names). Hopefully
> krh can shed some more light on that...

Deleting a branch in subversion and deleting a branch in git are a bit
different.

If you delete a branch in subversion, then you can still see it in older
revisions of the repository.

If you delete a branch in git, then it's just gone; there's no way of
accessing history on that branch. (If the branch was merged into a
different branch, then the history still appears there, of course.)

So the conservative thing to do when migrating from subversion to git is
not to do branch deletions. If the branch deletion was cleaning up some
mistake and you don't care about history on that branch, then you can do
it now with:

 git push origin :refs/heads/<branchname>

If you need to delete a tag to resolve an ambiguous situation, then
someone in the gitadmin or sysadmin groups will need to it for you,
since we don't typically allow that. Send mail to gitmaster gnome org 
(Currently goes to the members of the gitadmin group, will eventually go
to a request tracker queue.)

- Owen