Subject: Re: Replacing a Remote Branch

From: Thomas Rast <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:48:48 +0200

Eric James Michael Ritz wrote:
>   2. I realized I need to perform some ‘destructive’ action like
>   ‘rebase -i’ or amend the last commit to fix a typo in the message.
> 
>   3. Then I want to push the changed branch as a replacement.
[...]
>     $ git push origin :foo && git push origin foo
> 
> to replace `foo`.  But is there a shorter way to do this?  I thought
> that writing something like
> 
>     $ git push origin +foo:foo
> 
> may have the intended effect, but I still get a rejection due to a
> non-fast-forward, so I am likely misunderstanding the purpose of `+`.

Since + overrides the non-ff check, this means that the remote side
has receive.denyNonFastForwards (see man git-config) enabled (or a
hook to the same effect).  Deleting and pushing the new branch merely
defeats this refusal because it is no longer a branch *update*.

You should probably check why and by who receive.denyNonFastForwards
was set.  Git itself sets it if you use 'git init --shared', so that
may be one reason.

Note that non-ff updates are generally a bad thing for everyone who
has work based on the affected branch.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch