Make old git branches invisible without making them unreachable?

Question

Is there a way to make a git branch cease to show up when you type "git branch", but still remain reachable in the history, i.e. via gitk? I have many old branches that I want to get out of my sight, but I see no reason to delete history even of development dead-ends in a world with terabyte hard disks.

Tags might be close to what I'm looking for, but I don't want to have to name my dead ends beyond their commit message. Furthermore, I want reserve tags for especially good points in the mainline development history.

Answer 1

You can make up your own namespace inside refs/, such as refs/historic/foo, by manually using the update-ref command (and then deleting the branch).

Some caveats of this approach:

• They do not show up in git branch, but they do show up in git log --decorate and in gitk without any extra options, and you may use git show-ref to list all refs.
• They are not automatically fetched, so you if you want them transported you will have to use ls-remote and fetch them by hand.

However, it seems like a nice way to archive a branch, since it pops up when browsing history, can be explicitly listed, and does not clutter the branch or tag namespace.

Answer 2

Push the old branches to a remote repository on one of the many free Git hosting sites.