I've changed my branching system. How can I sort it out on github?

Question

So I've kind of done something a bit unusual. I had a couple of branches, master and dev. master had the latest stable version, and dev would have the bleeding edge, and would be merged into master at release.

However, this isn't so good, as a lot of people when they make pull requests, will make it to the master branch. Recently, I had to close a pull request, and ask them to checkout a new branch from the dev branch, and make the changes there, as the dev branch was very far ahead of the master branch, and merging would have been very tricky.

So, I decided to make dev master, and make master stable.

The first thing I did, with dev checked out:

git branch -m master stable

Then switch to the new branch:

git checkout stable

Then move dev to master:

git branch -m dev master

So, locally I now had two branches, master (previously dev) and stable (previously master).

I then checked out each branch individually, and ran git push origin <branchname> for each.

Problems

The first problem I noticed, was that even after the push, on the new stable branch (was master), I get this upon git status:

# On branch stable
# Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 6 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.
#
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

git still thinks that remotely this branch is associated with master, and because I made dev into master, it thinks that stable is behind. How can I get git to associate this branch with the correct remote one?

The second problem I noticed, on GitHub, branch dev still exists. How can I remove the remote version?

The third problem, on GitHub, if I select branch master, below it says latest commit to the dev branch. Will that change with a few commits? Same goes for the other branch (it says latest commit to master for stable).

How can I get the remote fully up-to-date with what is in my local repo?

Answer 1

1) For your first problem, you need set up your branch stable to track a remote branch origin/stable

 git branch --set-upstream stable origin/stable
 git branch --set-upstream master origin/master

2) For your second problem, delete remote branch using this git command

git push origin :dev

3) For your third problem, this will be alright after a commit, pull and push.