[swift-dev] Cleaning up stale branches?

[Dave Abrahams]

on Fri Oct 21 2016, John McCall <rjmccall-AT-apple.com> wrote:

>> On Oct 21, 2016, at 12:23 PM, Daniel Dunbar <daniel_dunbar at apple.com> wrote:
>>> On Oct 21, 2016, at 12:14 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org
> <mailto:swift-dev at swift.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> on Fri Oct 21 2016, John McCall <rjmccall-AT-apple.com <http://rjmccall-at-apple.com/>> wrote:
>
>>> 
>>>>> On Oct 21, 2016, at 10:39 AM, Dave Abrahams via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org <mailto:swift-dev at swift.org>> wrote:
>>>>> on Fri Oct 21 2016, Daniel Dunbar <swift-dev-AT-swift.org <http://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.  
>>> 
>>> True.  Maybe discoverability isn't the word I was looking for.  When
>>> three people want to collaborate on development of a feature branch,
>>> where should it live?
>> 
>> I agree... longer lived high profile branches make sense to me personally, just not short lived
> "push for purpose of PRing immediately" ones.
>
> Yeah, I agree.  Any sort of *collaborative* branch is 100% okay to
> live in the main repository.  If you weren't expecting a branch to be
> a collaboration and it starts turning into one, it's easy to just move
> it over from your personal fork at that point.

FWIW, if you visit https://github.com/apple/swift/branches you'll see
all your branches at the top, and you can delete (at least) any that
have already been merged.

-- 
-Dave