Re: delete dead feature branches?

[Jason Merrill <jason at redhat dot com>]

On 09/25/2009 12:55 PM, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> Do we believe any future conversion to another version control system
> (that might have a more structured notion of what is a branch than it
> simply being a directory used in a certain way) would continue to make the
> history of such branches readily available?  (This is more something to
> make sure of in the course of such a conversion, that this history is
> kept, but we might wish to avoid making such a conversion unnecessarily
> hard.)

git-svn seems to look at deleted branches during the import.

> We also have branches/dead/,

Does that have advantages over just deleting them?

> and a feature branch may be dead for reasons
> other than having been merged into trunk (for example, it may have been
> replaced by another branch without all changes being merged into trunk).

My inclination would be to delete branches like that as well.  I would 
distinguish between branches that have been replaced by another branch 
or trunk, which I would delete, and branches that haven't had any 
development on them in a while, but haven't been merged anywhere either, 
which I would retain.

Jason