Git fetch repeatedly tells me about the same new branch

Question

On one particular repo, when I run

git fetch

It does all the stuff it's supposed to do, but also reports:

 * [new branch]      Story/abc-123 -> origin/Story/abc-123

every single time.

if I run git branch -r | grep abc-123, it yields:

origin/story/abc-123

Note that in the output from the fetch, 'Story' is capitalized, but in the branch -r output it is not. The problem seems to be local. I don't have this issue if I make a new clone of the repo elsewhere, but I'd rather not go down this road if I can avoid it.

Is there any way to make it stop doing this?

Answer 1

The problem here is that your ./git/refs directory is in a different case for part of the branch name compared to the actual remote. I.e., git branch thinks the branch is lower case:

$git branch 
...
origin/story/abc-123
... 

But your copy of the refs thinks the story directory is upper case:

$ls .git/refs/remotes/origin
...
Story
...

Apparently you can just delete the entire refs directory and git will regenerate it, but because I was a coward I just fixed it by renaming the offending directory:

mv .git/refs/remotes/origin/Story .git/refs/remotes/origin/story