[gst-devel] Old branches in git

[Felipe Contreras]

Hi,

The tracker team blogged about their branch cleanup script[1], I ran
it, and here's the result:

Branch 'BRANCH-AUTOPLUG2' -- last commit was 9 years ago by Wim
Taymans (c199469)
Branch 'BRANCH-BUILD1' -- last commit was 9 years ago by Wim Taymans (a5c622d)
Branch 'BRANCH-CAPSNEGO1' -- last commit was 9 years ago by Wim
Taymans (91f9620)
Branch 'BRANCH-COMPANY' -- last commit was 5 years ago by Benjamin
Otte (c50aa69)
Branch 'BRANCH-ERROR' -- last commit was 7 years ago by Thomas Vander
Stichele (c4c3c99)
Branch 'BRANCH-EVENTS1' -- last commit was 9 years ago by Erik
Walthinsen (bdae23a)
Branch 'BRANCH-EVENTS2' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Benjamin
Otte (c9b994f)
Branch 'BRANCH-GOBJECT1' -- last commit was 9 years ago by Erik
Walthinsen (764caf7)
Branch 'BRANCH-GSTREAMER-0_6' -- last commit was 6 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (4741f33)
Branch 'BRANCH-GSTREAMER-0_8' -- last commit was 3 years, 8 months ago
by Thomas Vander Stichele (bda1740)
Branch 'BRANCH-INCSCHED1' -- last commit was 9 years ago by Erik
Walthinsen (e4de736)
Branch 'BRANCH-PLUGINVER1' -- last commit was 9 years ago by Richard
Boulton (17d0491)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_10_19' -- last commit was 2 years, 3 months
ago by Jan Schmidt (c5f91b6)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (3375670)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_4' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (62a4b53)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_4_0' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (b7d18c4)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_4_1' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (5161f29)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_4_2' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (f8629ac)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_5_0' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (3f5e601)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_5_1' -- last commit was 8 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (e241dee)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_5_2' -- last commit was 7 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (f168783)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_7_2' -- last commit was 7 years ago by David
Schleef (8c2d7db)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_7_4' -- last commit was 6 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (14595b0)
Branch 'BRANCH-RELEASE-0_7_5' -- last commit was 6 years ago by Thomas
Vander Stichele (c136227)
Branch 'BRANCH-THREADED' -- last commit was 5 years ago by Wim Taymans (dba80e1)
Branch 'CAPS' -- last commit was 7 years ago by David Schleef (63ee736)
Branch 'TYPEFIND' -- last commit was 7 years ago by Benjamin Otte (f7b9b17)

FWIW my understanding of git branches is that: they are pointers to
commits in order to easily reference them and avoid being cleaned by
garbage collection. They make sense as long as there's hope that the
commits in the branch will be used at some point; so that they can be
merged to master, rebased, or have more commits appended to it. As
soon as a branch is merged to the master branch, there's no point of
keeping it around, unless more commits on the branch are expected.
Another possibility is that the code diverged and a release was made
based on that commit; for such cases there's already tags pointing to
them, so the garbage collection wouldn't remove them.

Therefore, all those branches that came with the cvs -> git conversion
can be dropped, as nobody will ever use that code again or it's safely
tagged.

Cheers.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/mr/2010/07/08/tracker-branches-branches-branches/comment-page-1/#comment-357

-- 
Felipe Contreras