Re: ambiguous refname

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 16:21 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 15:38 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > Every time I push gnome-doc-utils changes, to git.gnome.org,
> > I get this:
> > 
> > error: refname 'GNOME_DOC_UTILS_0_4_3' is ambiguous
> > 
> > It isn't fatal, but I certainly don't want to look at it
> > for the rest of time.  Any ideas what the problem is?
> 
> All right, apparently there is both a branch and a tag
> named GNOME_DOC_UTILS_0_4_3.  I remember now that I'd
> accidentally tagged by copying to branches for 0.4.3.
> I then moved that to tags to fix it.
> 
> I know I can delete a branch with
> 
> git push origin :branchname
> 
> But since the ref is ambiguous, this doesn't work.
> I can't seem to figure out how to explicitly ref
> the branch.  Any ideas?

Use the explicit name instead of the shorthand

  git push origin :refs/heads/<branchname>

This has come up twice in the last few days, so it clearly belongs in
our documentation somewhere. I think generally "how to delete a branch"
should just be described with the "refs/heads/" form - although it's
more obscure, it's also more reliable.

- Owen