Proposal to change branch maintenance

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

I've been thinking a bit about how we maintain branches in archer.git
and I'd like to propose a few changes.  Let me know what you think.


First, going back to something Jan proposed years ago, I think we ought
to delete truly dead branches.  That is, if a branch has been merged
upstream and is no longer useful, let's just zap it.


Second, let's change our naming approach for new branches.  At the start
of the project I was largely ignorant of git, so I made some
obvious-in-retrospect mistakes here.

I think we should adopt the more git-like "/" separator, and drop the
"archer" prefix, as it is redundant given the repository.

So, new branches would be like "tromey/project" rather than the current
"archer-tromey-project".

I don't propose renaming existing branches.


Third, what about adopting a convention for a "README.archer" file in
the top-level of each branch?  This file would explain the branch's
purpose and would let us bypass the tedious step of updating the wiki
whenever pushing a new branch.

I think newer git even has some automated thing for documenting
branches, but unfortunately I think we aren't all on a new-enough git
yet.  We could adopt that when we're ready.

Tom