On 11/15/2019 7:51 AM, Alexander Grund via Boost wrote:
Private reply intentionally:
Completely understood your intention. Just wanted to give some background on the type of branches in question so decision makers have it easier.
I removed all the stale branches in Boost PP.
Am 15.11.19 um 13:49 schrieb Edward Diener via Boost:
On 11/15/2019 7:32 AM, Alexander Grund via Boost wrote:
Am 15.11.19 um 11:56 schrieb Edward Diener via Boost:
I received an issue about Boost PP having lots of old branches which the issuer would like removed. I notice most other Boost libraries also have lots of old branches. Is there any policy about removing these old branches from a Boost library repository ? Many of these old branches are svn-branches, but most of them do not have any value any more and, of course, do not affect the current 'develop' or 'master' branch.
It was me requesting this. See e.g. https://github.com/boostorg/preprocessor/branches/stale for about 70 stale branches. According to GitHub all(or at least most) of them are merged into master/develop as indicated by e.g. "1 commit ahead, 275 commits behind develop" where the "1 commit" is "This commit was manufactured by cvs2svn to create branch 'SPIRIT_1_6'."
I don't see any value in those branches, as they look like feature branches from SVN times that are already merged and hence obsolete. Every Fork will have them too which makes switching to new feature branches when developing cumbersome.
IMO one can delete all branches saying "1 commit ahead, *" where the latest commit is from "nobody" without further checking. The remaining ones might need a check if they actually contain new stuff.
I was just pointing out that Boost PP is hardly the only Boost library which has lots of stale branches. If it is not against Boost policy to delete old, stale branches I will be glad to do so, but I was just looking for some clarification from other Boost developers first.