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ihsoytoday at 3:15 PM3 repliesview on HN

Dont most git instances, like github, delete branch after a PR was merged, by default?

I am not sure under what usecases, you will end up with a lot of stale branches. And git fetch -pa should fix it locally


Replies

nightpooltoday at 3:21 PM

`--prune` will delete your local copies of the origin's branches (e.g. `origin/whatever`). But it won't delete your local branches (e.g. `whatever` itself). So PRs that you've worked on or checked out locally will never get deleted.

plqbfbvtoday at 3:20 PM

In Github it needs to be explicitly configured (Settings > General > Delete head branches after merging), Gitlab is the same.

A lot of my developer colleagues don't know how git works, so they have no idea that "I merged the PR" != "I deleted the feature branch". I once had to cleanup a couple repositories that had hundreds of branches spanning back 5+ years.

Nowadays I enforce it as the default project setting.

embedding-shapetoday at 3:42 PM

> Dont most git instances, like github, delete branch after a PR was merged, by default?

By default, I don't think so. And even if the branch is deleted, objects can still be there. I think GitLab has a "Clean stale objects" thing you can trigger, I don't seem to recall ever seeing any "Git Maintenance" UI actions on GitHub so not sure how it works there.