Proposal to change branch maintenance

[Tom Tromey]

Jan> I already did so, where do you see them?
Jan> 	archer.git "master" deletion (+branches cleanup)
Jan> 	Message-ID: <20111226231836.GA32067@host2.jankratochvil.net>
Jan> 	http://sourceware.org/ml/archer/2011-q4/msg00010.html
Jan> 	http://sourceware.org/ml/archer/2012-q1/msg00001.html
	
E.g., but there are really many more:

barimba. git branch -r |grep origin/gdb
  origin/gdb-4_18-branch
  origin/gdb-csl-20060226-branch
  origin/gdb-csl-arm-20051020-branch
  origin/gdb-csl-available-20060303-branch
  origin/gdb-csl-gxxpro-6_3-branch
  origin/gdb-csl-symbian-20060226-branch
  origin/gdb-premipsmulti-2000-06-06-branch
  origin/gdb_5_0-2000-04-10-branch
  origin/gdb_5_1-2001-07-29-branch
  origin/gdb_5_1_0_1-2002-01-03-branch
  origin/gdb_5_2-branch
  origin/gdb_5_3-branch
  origin/gdb_6_0-branch
  origin/gdb_6_1-branch
  origin/gdb_6_2-branch
  origin/gdb_6_2-branch-UNNAMED-BRANCH
  origin/gdb_6_3-branch
  origin/gdb_6_4-branch
  origin/gdb_6_5-branch
  origin/gdb_6_6-branch
  origin/gdb_6_7-branch
  origin/gdb_6_8-branch
  origin/gdb_7_1-branch
  origin/gdb_7_2-branch
  origin/gdb_s390-2001-09-26-branch

Jan> Those are two big pages with many solutions, which one do you mean?

Supplying a merge program to keep just the local version of
README.archer on a merge.

Jan> I quickly found there only dropping of the merged content; but in fact the
Jan> list of merged branches would be exactly useful during the merging:

It would be possible to do other kinds of automatic merging.
For example we could "cat" the two files together.

Tom> Alternatively we could pick the README file name based on the branch
Tom> name.  This isn't as convenient but it would also work.

Jan> The convenience depends on whether it is for branch author or for the merge
Jan> maintainer. :-)

Sure, but also we're either back to "user-branch.txt" or we're enforcing
branch base-name uniqueness.

I don't really mind either.

It's more typing to do "git show
origin/tromey/some-long-thing:tromey-some-long-thing.txt", but of course
it is scriptable, so no big deal.

Since you're doing most of the serious merges, how about you say which
you'd prefer?  I'd really like to get the branch info off the wiki,
since in practice I've found it is an impediment to pushing things...
but one of the major selling points of git is that we ought to be more
free here.

Tom