deleting branches (was: TopGit: How to retire obsolete topic branches?)

[martin f krafft]

also sprach martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> [2009.05.09.1113 +0200]:
> b. teach Git how to retire/rename published branches
> 
> I'll think about (b) for a bit and see if this wouldn't make sense
> to be raised with the Git people. Comments welcome, of course.

http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git?date=2009-05-09#l734

It turns out that remotely-deleted branches don't just get pushed
back, unless someone explicitly pushes them, or uses --all. Any
project needs a barrel of tar and many feathers for people who do
that without knowing what they're doing. A pre-update hook could be
used to permanently ban certain branch-names or refs from being
pushed back. Thus, the only persistent mess would be local, and
that's everyone's own responsibility.

The reason why the above might be a bit problematic with TopGit is
because TopGit adds a push ref to the configuration:

        push = +refs/top-bases/*:refs/top-bases/*
        push = +refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*

This overrides the default ':', which only pushes branches already
present remotely, and causes all local branches to be pushed. I've
been bitten by this plenty of times before.

We can only hope that Marc Weber's tg-push will allow us to get rid
of the push refs:

  http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?group=gmane.comp.version-control.git&article=117554

Ideally, git-push should be able to push associated branches, e.g.
any TopGit refs related to a branch it pushes, instead of
implementing and maintaining the same logic in tg-push. We'll see.

To recap: if TopGit learnt how to fold branches and retire them, and
it would also remove remote branches appropriately, *and* people
with push access could be trusted not to dumbly push them back (or
a hook preventing them from doing so), we'd have what we want.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o>      Related projects:
: :'  :  proud Debian developer               http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck    http://vcs-pkg.org
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