[OpenLayers-Dev] MOTION: delete old branches

[Tim Schaub]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:53 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
> As for other large projects not having release branches, IMHO openlayers
> is not special and the other projects are all behaving oddly.  NetBSD
> (in CVS still) has branches netbsd-{2,3,4,5} for 2.0/2.1, 3.0/3.1
> etc. and also e.g. netbsd-5-0 for point fixes to 5.0 (as 5.0.1 etc), and
> so on.  These persist, even though now there is little interest in 2.x.
> But, CVS doesn't have an easy "show me all the branches UI.

Yeah, I think we'll continue to see things differently.  In my
opinion, the other projects (git, linux, jquery, et al.) are not doing
things oddly at all.  I think it makes good sense that branches are
temporary - places for feature development (or release work).  We're
not going to be maintaining divergent lines of development.

If you want to re-create a branch from any commit (using, for example
a tag name), it is trivial.

    git checkout -b oldstuff release-1.0

And there you have the full history of what was the 1.0 branch.  From
there you could make a fix and release 1.0.1.

I don't think it's just about UI.  Saying NetBSD does it in CVS is not
enough for me.  There should be some solid justification for leaving
old branches around if we're going to do it.

Thanks for the discussion.

Tim

-- 
Tim Schaub
OpenGeo http://opengeo.org/
Expert service straight from the developers.