[Nix-dev] Why are there so many branches in the nixpkgs repo

[Bjørn Forsman]

On 14 February 2015 at 11:57, Matthias Beyer <mail at beyermatthias.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> why are there so many branches in the nixpkgs repo? I mean, what are
> they are for?
>
> Maybe we should remove some of them,... I don't think, for example,
> that
>
>     0.5-stable
>     upstart
> or
>     test-1515
>
> are even relevant anymore, are they?

Good question. I've been thinking the same; there are way to many
old/stale branches in official nixpkgs repo. Similar for tags. Here
are just a few:

backups/parallel-building-merger at 34171
backups/pure-python at 34174
backups/stdenv-ada at 26758
backups/stdenv-bootstrap-20100825 at 23426
backups/stdenv-updates-merge at 10849
backups/stdenv-updates2 at 18273
backups/stdenv-updates2 at 18282
backups/stdenv-updates at 10965

And further, about tags:

$ git describe
fatal: No annotated tags can describe
'8e62c497ca82af93a45d65ebdbb2bad808e5bc7b'.
However, there were unannotated tags: try --tags.

$ git describe --tags
last-glibc-2.13-33480-g8e62c49

That's not right.... it should say 14.12-something or 15.05-something.
(And the tag should be _annotated_, so we know who tagged it and
when.)

- Bjørn