Re: Marking abandoned branches

From: Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 13, 2006, 15:59 UTC
Message-ID: <9e4733910609130859v347a7a9ew5c3ebc982bf9b07b@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20060913152451.GH23891@pasky.or.cz>

On 9/13/06, Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Dear diary, on Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 05:17:59PM CEST, I got a letter
> where Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> 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? :-)

It is a historical import. Everything that was in the initial repo needs to be preserved otherwise they aren't going to get rid of the old CVS repo.

Show 7 quoted lines

> 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.
>
> Object classes are precious things and we shouldn't get carried away.

If this is done with an object there should probably be some way to encode it into the existing commit object.

Moving the refs into refs/abandoned would work too. We would need new git commands to do this and flags on the visualization tools to include the abandoned branches. On the other hand doing this is recording state about the repository in the refs directory instead of writing this state into the repo itself.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com