(tl;dr version: I'm going to clean up refs/remotes/** in git, which contains duplicate history and messes with 'git clone --mirror'; these are refs which are neither branches nor tags and leftover from git-svn)
So, when we switched from svn to git, there were a lot of leftover refs left in the git repository that are from old branches/history which has already been merged into the branches/tags that we've since created. I think these were leftover from weird git-svn behavior. These can, and should, be cleaned up. You can see all of them when you do a: git ls-remote origin In that output, our current branches are the refs/heads/*, and our tags are the refs/tags/* The extras which need to be cleaned up are the refs/remotes/* (including refs/remotes/tags/*) As you can see, these are duplicates of branches which have been merged in already, or temporary tags which didn't make it to a release (release candidates) but whose relevant history is already in our normal git history, or they are branches which were abandoned on purpose (ACCUMULO-722). Usually these extra refs don't present a problem, because we don't normally see them when we clone (they aren't branches which are normally fetched). However, there are a few cases where this is a problem. In particular, they show up when you do "git clone --mirror", and if you push this mirror to another git repository, like a GitLab mirror (git push --mirror), they show up as extra branches which don't appear to exist in the original (a very confusing situation for a "mirror"). The interesting thing about these, is that even when they have the same history as the git branches/tags we maintain now, the SHA1s don't match up. This seems to imply they were leftover from a previous invocation of git-svn. So, what I'd like to do is go through each of these extra refs one by one, and figure out if we already have this history in our branches/tags. If we do, then I'd delete these extras. If we don't (as in the case of ACCUMULO-722), I'd just convert that to a normal git branch (refs/heads/*) until we decide what to do with it at some future point in time (for example, perhaps do a 'git format-patch' on it and attach the files to the "Won't Fix" ticket so we can delete the dead branch? not sure, but that can be deferred).
