Since we have a lot of people creating and merging branches on the Metasploit GitHub repository, we need to periodically get rid of old and abandoned branches. Here's my technique:
Go there and check out every remote branch we've got. That way, if you screw up and delete something important, you can add it back in later from this backup clone.
`todb@presto:~/github/todb-r7/metasploit-framework$ for b in `git branch -r | grep -v "HEAD -> origin" | sed 's/^ origin\///'`; do git checkout -b $b --track origin/$b; done
Now, clone metasploit again. I do this because I have like 20 remotes to deal with on my "real" clone and I don't want to have to grep through all my origin vs non-origin stuff.
That gives a pretty good idea of how many branches we're talking about.
# Start deleting old, merged branches
Here's a one-liner, lightly modified from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2514172/listing-each-branch-and-its-last-revisions-date-in-git#2514279 which lists all remote **merged** branches in date order.
Count off how many you want to keep at the end, do the arithmetic, and tack on another couple pipes to catch everything that's more than two weeks old. These are the merged branches that nobody's likely to miss.
mazikeen:./msf-prune$ for k in `git branch -r --merged |grep -v "HEAD ->" | sed s/^..//`; do echo -e `git log -1 --pretty=format:"%Cgreen%ci %Cblue%cr%Creset" $k --`\\t"$k";done | sort | head -45 | sed "s/^.*origin\///" > /tmp/merged_to_delete.txt
Sometimes, some people may run into sync problems with these missing branches and need to `git remote prune origin` themselves. Alternatively, they want to look into these branches again -- especially the unmerged ones. So, let people know that you just did this on the metasploit-hackers list and the Freenode IRC channel. If someone wants an old branch back, just go to your backup clone and push it back up as you would any branch: `git checkout branchname && git push origin branchname`. No problem.
