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

[Bjørn Forsman]

On 17 February 2015 at 10:44, Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 16/02/15 18:43, Matthias Beyer wrote:
>
>> what do you think about removing the old branches, as listed below (I
>> guess all before 12-2014 or something) should be removed,...
>
> No, they should not be removed, unless they were merged. Deleting history kind
> of defeats the purpose of having a version management system...

Unmerged branches is a "grey area", IMHO.

If a branch was never merged (and was not a stable/maint branch), the
code is (in a way) no more part of project history than any of the
nixpkgs forks and topic-branches floating around on the internet
today. (Not all forks get merged, and unmerged forks become less and
less important as time passes.) I must emphasize that this is from the
viewpoint of "a newcomer" to the project. I realize that those of you
that have contributed to those branches may feel differently about
them.

I think of the old branches in nixpkgs more as traces of its more
"centralized" days.  (Many of the branches are from the subversion
era, right?)

> However, we could rename dead branches to something like attic/<name>.

Yes, that's sounds better than what we have now. Alternatively, we
could make a "historic" repo clone (like Nathan Bijnens suggests).
nixpkgs-historic? Then we have an option to clean up some less used
branches/tags in the mainline repo.

- Bjørn