Only fetch a subset of remote git branches or only display a subset of them in gitk

Question

If other developers push their local branches to a shared remote repository before committing to trunk (to share, backup, or centrally store them for access from multiple machines), is there a way for me to easily only fetch my own branches or selectively delete local references to others' remote branches? If not, is there a way to only show a subset of remote branches in gitk, so I can see where my branches are relative to my remote branches, but not have the graph cluttered by everyone else's remote branches?

Answer 1

Here's one way of only fetching particular branches from a remote:

The refs (including branches) that are fetched from a remote are controlled with the config option remote.<remote-name>.fetch. For example, your remote.origin.fetch is probably the refspec:

+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

... which means to make fetch the names of all the refs under refs/heads/ in the remote repository, and make them available under refs/remotes/origin/ in your local repository. (The + means to do forced updates, so your remote-tracking branches can be updated even if the update wouldn't be a fast-forward.)

You can instead list multiple refspecs that specify particular branches to fetch, e.g. changing this with:

 git config remote.origin.fetch +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master
 git config --add remote.origin.fetch +refs/heads/blah:refs/remotes/origin/blah

... and then the next time only master and blah will be fetched.

Of course, you already locally have lots of remote-tracking branches, and gitk will still show those. You can remove each of the ones you're not interested in with:

git branch -r -d origin/uninteresting