Why are deleted branches not removed on the remote after pushing?

Question

I am using git-flow and what it does is that it deletes my feature/abc branch whenever I do :

git flow feature abc finish

It deletes the feature/abc branch after merging it with develop branch. After that I push my develop branch.

git push origin develop

Now, on the remote I am able to see the feature/abc branch, but not locally. So, does that means it deleted from local repo and that delete didn't got carried to remote ?

In my understanding :

• Since git is distributed, so the whole repo exists on all machines.
• So, if I do a change in my local repo and push it to a remote.
• Then, all my changes should be pushed to the remote, including the delete.

Conflict:

• How can local and remote git repo be different after a push.

=> Assume I am the sole developer on the code.

Update

My question is that I deleted the branch locally post merge. then I pushed the branch to which I merged, then why didn't that reflect on the remote ? Since, GIT is DVCS and should be identical on push / pull. [ Considering I am the only dev ]

I didn't asked to create it either. It made the branch made my changes, merged it back then deleted the branch and pushed my updated develop branch. So, if it automatically detects the creation of those branches then why not the deletion ?

Answer 1

Since, GIT is DVCS and should be identical on push / pull.

No, that’s not really true. It is distributed so each repository within the net more or less contains the same data, but only more or less. When you use push and pull, you explicitely specify what is being pushed.

git push remote branch only pushes the the branch pointer branch to the remote repository and transfers all commits the remote repository needs to construct it, but not more. This means that only the commit the branch points to and all parents are actually pushed until the remote repository finds a common parent that it already has (in the worst case, this is the special zero-commit, i.e. the empty parent).

In the same way git pull remote branch only fetches the changes required to construct the remote branch remote/branch locally.

To really get all commits, you can use git fetch, and to push all local branches you can use git push --all. But again, it only fetches/pushes the commits necessary to construct the branches (or tags), not everything the repository has.

Now, when you push branches to the remote repository it will update only those branches you actually pushed, so when you deleted a local remote and push with --all, then only your local branches are pushed, and that does not include the deleted one. So your local Git does no longer know which branches you locally deleted (because they were merged) and as such cannot give that information to the remote repository automatically. What it can do however is tell the remote repository every branch it locally has so the remote can figure out which was deleted. You do this by using the option --prune. Note however that this removes all branches that do not exist locally, so it might make problems when working with multiple users that push different branches but don't pull the other ones (I actually never tested that though).

The best thing is obviously to remove locally deleted branches directly:

git push remote :branch