Re: [PATCH v2] symbolic-ref: teach "--[no-]recurse" option

> Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> writes:
>
>> Is there also a need to update SubmittingPatches to clarify the
>> distinctions between the generic name 'maint', the specific `maint-xx`
>> branches, and the symbolic ref linkages from `maint`.
> Not at all.  Perhaps you are thinking about MaintNotes, but even
> there, general public do not have to be concerned about maint-xx
> most of the time.  I myself would not be keeping branches for
> ancient maintenance tracks anywhere.  As the older maintenance
> tracks, other than the most recent ones, do not get topics graduated
> to 'master' merged down by me (even though topic branches that fix
> notable bugs may fork from an older version to allow motivated third
> party maintainers to merge them down to older maintenance releases),
> there is not really a reason to keep branches like maint-2.15 for
> daily operation.  Only when we need security updates that go back to
> older maintenance tracks, I may do
>
>     $ git checkout -b maint-2.30 v2.30.5
>     $ git merge cve-something-fix
>     ... edit release notes etc. ...
>     $ git commit -m 'Git 2.30.6'
>     $ git tag -s -m 'Git 2.30.6' v2.30.6
>
> but after that is done, there is no reason to keep an old branch
> like maint-2.30 lying around, other than to make it easier to
> prepare for v2.30.7 (as maint-2.30 will remember what tag was the
> latest on that particular maintenance track).
>
>> The descriptions give the impression there is just a single main branch,
>> with a singular name, and that was the end of it.
> And that is the correct world view for most of the  general public.
>
>     https://github.com/git/git/
>
> shows 'maint', 'master' ('main'), 'next', and 'seen' from the
> project code, plus 'todo' which holds an unrelated history that
> keeps track of maintenance tools and misc stuff.
>
> By the way, I do not personally have 'main' in my working
> repository.  The only trick I have to help folks who expect to see
> 'main' instead of 'master' is the push refspec to distribute the
> integration results to various repositories.  My 'master' is pushed
> to both 'master' and 'main' in destination repositories.
>
> The mirror/backup repository of my private working repository does
> have tentive branches, like the broken-out topic branches that are
> still active, which are pruned when they no longer are needed.
> Some maint-xx branches are also there but they are there not because
> they are necessary but because I just haven't bothered to clean them
> up ;-)
>