From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:40:10 GMT Subject: Re: Marking abandoned branches Message-ID: <7vmz93a9v9.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> In-Reply-To: Johannes Schindelin writes: >> Dear diary, on Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 05:17:59PM CEST, I got a letter >> where Jon Smirl said that... >> > Abandoned branches are common in CVS since it is not distributed. >> > People start working on something in the main repo and then decide it >> > was a bad idea. In the git world these branches usually don't end up >> > in the main repo. >> >> Can't you just toss the branch away in that case? :-) >> >> You could also stash the ref to refs/heads-abandoned/ instead of >> refs/heads/ if you want to keep the junk around for some reason. Of >> course you don't get the nice marker with explanation of why is this >> abandoned and who decided that, but you can just use an empty commit for >> the same purpose. > > ... or a tag (remember, you can stash a tag into refs/abandoned/, instead > of a commit) with the further benefit that you really cannot commit on top > of that. Using tag has an added benefit that you now have a place to say why you dropped it. So what we would need to support this is an agreed-upon name under $GIT_DIR/refs/ that is omitted from display by convention across Porcelains (the core side should not ignore them because even when you are abandoning them, you do not want to lose them),