[swift-dev] Cleaning up stale branches?

[John McCall]

> On Oct 21, 2016, at 10:39 AM, Dave Abrahams via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org> wrote:
> on Fri Oct 21 2016, Daniel Dunbar <swift-dev-AT-swift.org> wrote:
> 
>> While on this topic...
>> 
>> GitHub's support for doing cross-repo pull requests is
>> excellent. Anyone can easily fork the main repo, and push to their
>> side repo (for example, with: `git push ddunbar
>> HEAD:name-of-my-new-branch`) and the GitHub web UI on the main repo
>> will automatically show you a handy button for creating the PR.
>> 
>> With this level of support, IMHO branches usually should be pushed to
>> individual's own repos, not the main repo.
> 
> IMO it depends whether you think Swift development should be
> discoverable.  When the Swift project formally engages in developing
> something like the new integer and floating point models, there's an
> advantage to having it in the main repository.

I don't understand this argument.  Looking at a list of branches is not a useful
way of discovering development history — you don't know which branches are
still active, which branches were merged, or which branches were completely
abandoned.  Moreover, branches are just commit histories and so are missing
all sorts of useful discussion and review that are just as much a part of the
development history.  All of these disadvantages are addressed by instead
looking at pull requests, and once you're looking at a pull request, it does not
matter what repository it came from.

John.