Why do pull requests appear when fetching

Question

Every time I get fetch from a GitHub repo, a bunch of pull requests are fetched from the remote:

/c/git/myProject>git fetch
From github.com:MyOrganization/myProject
 * [new ref]         refs/pull/1/head -> origin/pr/1
 * [new ref]         refs/pull/10/head -> origin/pr/10
 * [new ref]         refs/pull/11/head -> origin/pr/11
 * [new ref]         refs/pull/12/head -> origin/pr/12
 ...

To get rid of these, I use git remote prune origin or git fetch --prune, but the pull requests come back when I git fetch again. I found some references on the web that enable fetching pull requests locally (add fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/* to .git/config), but I have not done this.

My coworker does not see this issue and his ~/.gitconfig and .git/config look similar to mine. He uses git under cygwin, and I use git-bash that comes with GitHub for Windows (not the GUI), version 1.0.47.0.

Any ideas why this is happening and how to stop it?

Answer 1

GitHub for Windows's "Git Portable" (a portable MsysGit installation) sets the fetch refspec globally to include pull requests; you can see that by doing a git config --list in git-bash.

You can undo this by removing the respective fetchspec, e.g.:

git config --system --unset remote.origin.fetch