title: How do you stop tracking a remote branch in Git?
body: <p>How do you stop tracking a remote branch in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29" rel="noreferrer">Git</a>?</p>
  
  <p>I am asking to stop tracking because in my concrete case, I want to delete the local branch, but not the remote one. Deleting the local one and pushing the deletion to remote will delete the remote branch as well:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/2003505/367456">How do I delete a Git branch both locally and in GitHub?</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Can I just do <code>git branch -d the_branch</code>, and it won't get propagated when I later <code>git push</code>? </p>
  
  <p>Will it only propagate if I were to run <code>git push origin :the_branch</code> later on?</p>