[Mesa-dev] [PATCH] docs: add note about sending merge-requests from forks

[Eric Engestrom]

On Wednesday, 2019-01-23 11:21:27 +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-01-23 at 10:14 +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Wed, 23 Jan 2019 at 10:09, Eric Engestrom <
> > eric.engestrom at intel.com> wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, 2019-01-23 10:36:15 +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> > > > Sending MRs from the main Mesa repository increase clutter in the
> > > > repository, and decrease visibility of project-wide branches. So
> > > > it's
> > > > better if MRs are sent from forks instead.
> > > > 
> > > > Let's add a note about this, in case its not obvious to everyone.
> > > 
> > > Yes please, we already have way too many dead branches in the main
> > > repo
> > > without adding that kind of things to it.
> > > 
> > > One other thing is that (last time I checked) the scripts
> > > propagating
> > > the repo to github et al. don't propagate branch deletions, which
> > > means
> > > the clutter never gets cleaned there.
> > 
> > They're propagated from gitlab.fd.o to git.fd.o, as the hook is run
> > within regular post-receive, but you're right that pushing from
> > git.fd.o to GitHub doesn't notice old branches, as it just pushes
> > everything present in the git.fd.o repo to GitHub, and doesn't notice
> > any branches no longer present.
> 
> Yeah, and then add the problem that forking in Github copies *all*
> branches as well (not just the default branch), means that these
> branches keeps getting replicated over there. It gets nasty quickly.
> 
> Perhaps we should do a manual spring cleaning in the repo soon, moving
> old, stale branches out to some historical repo and making sure
> official forks don't have any cruft?

I looked at that a year or two ago, but I quickly gave up. You're welcome
to give it a go, but be aware that there's a very large number of very old
branches.

One thing we could do is restrict new-branch pushes to the main repo to only
allow the \d+\.\d of release branches and their staging/* and *-proposed
counterparts.