Proposal to change branch maintenance

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

On Monday, February 11 2013, Tom Tromey wrote:

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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".

Agreed.

> I don't propose renaming existing branches.

IMO it would be better to rename the existing branches so that we "start
fresh", instead of leaving old stuff behind.

> 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.

Fine by me too.

> 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.

I'd prefer this rather than the README.archer file, but I couldn't find
anything related (except the "--edit-description" option from
git-branch, which apparently doesn't do exactly what you described, as
pointed by others).

I would like to propose another thing: the archer repository should
accept "git push --force".  It is annoying having to delete & re-create
the branch you're working on because you're using git-rebase to maintain
a series of patches.  Maybe we could talk to Jim about that?

Thanks,

-- 
Sergio