[phire]

It seems very useful for archiving branches that never got merged.

Sometimes I work on a feature, and it doesn’t quite work out for some reason or another. The branch will probably never get merged, but it’s still useful for reference later when I want to see what didn’t work when taking a second attempt.

Currently, those abandoned branches have been polluting my branch list. In the past I have cloned the repo a second time just to “archive” them. Tags seem like a better idea.

[skydhash]

I don’t think I’ve ever returned to a branch that I can easily rebase on top of the main branch. And if I really wanted to, I’d prefer to extract a patch so that I can copy the interesting lines.

Any branch older than 6 months is a strong candidate for deletion.

[dotancohen]

I sometimes leave merged branches around for quite a while, because I squash them when I merge to master and sometimes when tracking down a bug the ability to bisect very handy.

[matijsvzuijlen]

What made you decide to squash when merging instead of leaving the commits in the history so you can always bisect?

[quesera]

Not GP, but we do the same. Branches become the atomic unit of bisection in master, but the need is extremely rare. I think because we have good tests.

We also keep merged branches around. This has never happened, but if we needed to bisect at the merged-branch level, we could do that.

I know squash-merge isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I find it to be simpler and clearer for the 99+% case, and only slightly less convenient for the remainder.

[dotancohen]

The range reason your history textbook is not infinitely long. The longer something is, the less digestible. When we need more granularity, it's there in the branches.

[ervine]

Wonder if it's worth squashing in the branch, merging to main, then immediately reverting.

Now the work is visible in history, branch can be deleted, and anyone in the future can search the ticket number or whatever if your commit messages are useful.

Dunno if it's worth polluting history, just thinking out loud.

[PunchyHamster]

let it go. You will not bother fixing those to work with master.

It just moves trash from branch list to tag list.