[Maria-developers] Deleting unused branches on github
We currently have more than 200 branches in the MariaDB Server github repo,
most of which look like they are no longer used. I would like to remove the
unused ones to remove clutter. Eg. in `git branch -la` or the drop-downs on
the github webpage.
Below is a list of a little less than two-thirds of the branches that I
determined to be probably unused. I was fairly conservative in my criteria,
ie. if there was reasonable doubt, I omitted a branch from the list to
delete.
Please take a look at the list and see if there is any branch that should
_not_ be deleted from the github repository. Or if someone objects to
deleting anything on principle grounds, let me know as well, of course.
(I Cc'ed people that were the last to commit on a branch to be deleted).
Note that if one of these branches should become needed again later,
eg. some bb-XXX branch not used for a long time, there is no problem
re-creating it. The only problem with removing a branch should be if it
contains contents that will be needed in the future, and which is not
available anywhere else (and I tried to avoid putting such branches on the
list in the first place).
Also note that once these are deleted, a simple `git pull` will not remove
them from the local clone. The `git fetch --prune` can be used to effect
this.
If there are no objections, I will do the deletions in two weeks.
- Kristian.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
These branches have not been updated for a long time, and looked like they
were not used any more. They are annotated with the date and the committer
of the last commit:
origin/bb-10.2-decimal 5 months ago Monty
Hi Kristian, Thanks for raising this issue. Amount of branches is painful indeed. A few comments from my side. First, your list seem to be quite outdated. Did you run git remote prune origin? At the moment of writing https://github.com/MariaDB/server says there're 124 branches. At least the following branches don't seem to exist anymore:
origin/bb-10.1-systemd 1 year ago Sergey Vojtovich
origin/bb-svoj 1 year, 1 month ago Sergey Vojtovich origin/bb-10.1-atomics 1 year, 10 months ago Sergei Golubchik origin/bb-lf-no-oom 1 year, 10 months ago Sergei Golubchik origin/bb-lf-iterator 1 year, 11 months ago Sergey Vojtovich origin/bb-no-ndb 2 years, 3 months ago Sergei Golubchik origin/bb-10.2-mdev10813 MDEV-10813 Closed origin/bb-10.2-mdev5492 MDEV-5492 Closed origin/bb-10.2-MDEV-6720 MDEV-6720 Closed origin/bb-10.2-mdev9857 MDEV-9857 Closed origin/bb-10.2-mdev7660 MDEV-7660 Closed origin/bb-mdev6089 MDEV-6089 Closed origin/bb-mdev7715 MDEV-7715 Closed origin/bb-mdev7728 MDEV-7728 Closed origin/bb-mdev7793 MDEV-7793 Closed origin/bb-mdev7894 MDEV-7894 Closed origin/bb-mdev7895 MDEV-7895 Closed origin/bb-mdev7922 MDEV-7922 Closed origin/mdev-8380 MDEV-8380 Closed origin/svoj-gittest 1 year, 6 months ago Sergey Vojtovich
Second, I strongly suggest not to remove anything without branch owner approval. Potential data loss overweights clean-up benefits. At least the following branches may have valuable revisions:
origin/10.1-spider 1 year, 1 month ago Michael Widenius
origin/10.0-power 1 year, 7 months ago Sergey Vojtovich
On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 01:26:07PM +0100, Kristian Nielsen wrote:
We currently have more than 200 branches in the MariaDB Server github repo, most of which look like they are no longer used. I would like to remove the unused ones to remove clutter. Eg. in `git branch -la` or the drop-downs on the github webpage.
Below is a list of a little less than two-thirds of the branches that I determined to be probably unused. I was fairly conservative in my criteria, ie. if there was reasonable doubt, I omitted a branch from the list to delete.
Please take a look at the list and see if there is any branch that should _not_ be deleted from the github repository. Or if someone objects to deleting anything on principle grounds, let me know as well, of course.
(I Cc'ed people that were the last to commit on a branch to be deleted).
Note that if one of these branches should become needed again later, eg. some bb-XXX branch not used for a long time, there is no problem re-creating it. The only problem with removing a branch should be if it contains contents that will be needed in the future, and which is not available anywhere else (and I tried to avoid putting such branches on the list in the first place).
Also note that once these are deleted, a simple `git pull` will not remove them from the local clone. The `git fetch --prune` can be used to effect this.
If there are no objections, I will do the deletions in two weeks.
- Kristian. ...skip...
Regards, Sergey
Sergey Vojtovich
First, your list seem to be quite outdated. Did you run git remote prune origin? At the moment of writing https://github.com/MariaDB/server says there're 124 branches.
I did not :-(. Bummer, that was stupid, I even wrote in the mail how removing branches remotely would not affect local clones without git fetch --prune or similar. Below is an updated lists with only branches that are still in the repo, thanks for pointing out the mistake.
Second, I strongly suggest not to remove anything without branch owner approval. Potential data loss overweights clean-up benefits.
Right, that was the intention of my mail, Cc:'ing the top committer in each branch (sorry I seem to have forgotten to Cc: you). Or do you have a better way to determine who is the branch owner of a particular branch? Of course, if a branch should somehow end up being wrongly removed, I will just re-push it from a backup I will take before deleting. But better to avoid errorneous removal in the first place.
At least the following branches may have valuable revisions:
origin/10.1-spider 1 year, 1 month ago Michael Widenius
origin/10.0-power 1 year, 7 months ago Sergey Vojtovich
Ok, thanks, I've removed them from the lists.
Updated list with branches to be removed below.
- Kristian.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
These branches have not been updated for a long time, and looked like they
were not used any more. They are annotated with the date and the committer
of the last commit:
origin/bb-10.2-decimal 5 months ago Monty
Hi! ALL BRANCH OWNERS: PLEASE REVIEW AND CLEANUP YOUR STALE BRANCHES AT https://github.com/MariaDB/server/branches/yours IT SHOULDN'T TAKE MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES! On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 04:59:44PM +0100, Kristian Nielsen wrote: ...skip...
Right, that was the intention of my mail, Cc:'ing the top committer in each branch (sorry I seem to have forgotten to Cc: you).
Or do you have a better way to determine who is the branch owner of a particular branch? Top committer is fine.
Of course, if a branch should somehow end up being wrongly removed, I will just re-push it from a backup I will take before deleting. But better to avoid errorneous removal in the first place.
I'm more worried that this email will be largerly ignored. I suggest we wait 1-2 weeks and then start catching people on IRC with the same request. If there's no action, we may consider we did our best and aren't obligated to keep these branches anymore.
At least the following branches may have valuable revisions:
origin/10.1-spider 1 year, 1 month ago Michael Widenius
origin/10.0-power 1 year, 7 months ago Sergey Vojtovich Ok, thanks, I've removed them from the lists.
Updated list with branches to be removed below.
- Kristian.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
These branches have not been updated for a long time, and looked like they were not used any more. They are annotated with the date and the committer of the last commit:
origin/bb-10.2-decimal 5 months ago Monty
origin/bb-10.1-jan2 8 months ago Jan Lindström origin/bb-10.1-xtrabackup 8 months ago Vladislav Vaintroub origin/10.2-window_simple 9 months ago Sergei Petrunia origin/bb-10.2-vicentiu-create 10 months ago Vicențiu Ciorbaru origin/10.2-travis-ci 12 months ago Otto Kekäläinen origin/bb-10.1-jan-encryption 1 year, 1 month ago Jan Lindström origin/bb-10.1-default 1 year, 3 months ago Monty origin/10.0-FusionIO-Galera 1 year, 4 months ago Jan Lindström origin/10.0-custombld 1 year, 4 months ago Kristian Nielsen origin/10.1-window 1 year, 4 months ago Vicentiu Ciorbaru origin/10.0-FusionIO 1 year, 5 months ago Jan Lindström origin/bb-10.1-binlog_row_image 1 year, 5 months ago Vicențiu Ciorbaru origin/sanja-old-10.0-batch 1 year, 10 months ago Oleksandr Byelkin origin/bb-10.1-eperi 1 year, 11 months ago Michael Widenius These branches all contain an MDEV in their name that has been closed:
origin/10.1-MDEV-6877-binlog_row_image MDEV-6877 Closed origin/10.2-MDEV-8348 MDEV-8348 Closed origin/10.2-MDEV-9114 MDEV-9114 Closed origin/bb-10.0.22-mdev8989 MDEV-8989 Closed origin/bb-10.0-galera-mdev8496-hf MDEV-8496 Closed origin/bb-10.0-mdev-10341 MDEV-10341 Closed origin/bb-10.1-mdev6657-r2 MDEV-6657 Closed origin/bb-10.1-mdev8646 MDEV-8646 Closed origin/bb-10.1-mdev8989 MDEV-8989 Closed origin/bb-10.1-mdev9362 MDEV-9362 Closed origin/bb-10.1-mdev-9468 MDEV-9468 Closed origin/bb-10.2-mdev8646 MDEV-8646 Closed origin/bb-10.2-mdev8789 MDEV-8789 Closed origin/bb-10.2-mdev9864 MDEV-9864 Closed origin/bb-5.5-mdev6735 MDEV-6735 Closed origin/bb-5.5-mdev-9304 MDEV-9304 Closed origin/bb-vicentiu-mdev7978 MDEV-7978 Closed origin/hf-10.1-mdev9021 MDEV-9021 Closed origin/hf-10.1-mdev9853 MDEV-9853 Closed origin/MDEV-8909 MDEV-8909 Closed
These branches are fully merged into an existing main tree (5.5, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 5.5-galera, or 10.0-galera), and have not been updated for a while:
origin/MDEV-8947 5 months ago Kristian Nielsen
origin/10.2-test1234 6 months ago Galina Shalygina origin/10.2-connector-c-integ 7 months ago Vladislav Vaintroub origin/bb-10.2-mdev9543 7 months ago Sergei Petrunia origin/10.0-defragment 1 year, 6 months ago Vicentiu Ciorbaru origin/bb-5.5-knielsen 1 year, 8 months ago Kristian Nielsen
Regards, Sergey
Hi!
I'm wondering if it makes sense to have an automatic cleanup process for
branches older than X months?
We can potentially add some exceptions for work that needs to stay.
Regards,
Vicențiu
On Mon, 7 Nov 2016 at 18:54 Sergey Vojtovich
Hi!
ALL BRANCH OWNERS: PLEASE REVIEW AND CLEANUP YOUR STALE BRANCHES AT https://github.com/MariaDB/server/branches/yours
IT SHOULDN'T TAKE MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES!
On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 04:59:44PM +0100, Kristian Nielsen wrote: ...skip...
Right, that was the intention of my mail, Cc:'ing the top committer in each branch (sorry I seem to have forgotten to Cc: you).
Or do you have a better way to determine who is the branch owner of a particular branch? Top committer is fine.
Hi, On 11/07/2016 08:59 PM, Vicențiu Ciorbaru wrote:
Hi!
I'm wondering if it makes sense to have an automatic cleanup process for branches older than X months?
Please don't do that. It happens that some work is delayed for really long period of time. Neither the first (by date) nor the second (by MDEV status) list are suitable for the automatic process. The third one (branches that are fully merged) might be, but it should be considered carefully, I don't have sufficient git expertise to decide if it's reliable enough.
We can potentially add some exceptions for work that needs to stay.
How would it work? When you create a branch and work on something, you don't know yet that it would be delayed. Then it is, you think it's for a week maybe, switch to something else, and you won't remember to revisit the branch until the task comes back to life... Who would care about making it an exception, and when? Regards, /E
Regards, Vicențiu
On Mon, 7 Nov 2016 at 18:54 Sergey Vojtovich
mailto:svoj@mariadb.org> wrote: Hi!
ALL BRANCH OWNERS: PLEASE REVIEW AND CLEANUP YOUR STALE BRANCHES AT https://github.com/MariaDB/server/branches/yours
IT SHOULDN'T TAKE MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES!
On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 04:59:44PM +0100, Kristian Nielsen wrote: ...skip...
> Right, that was the intention of my mail, Cc:'ing the top committer in each > branch (sorry I seem to have forgotten to Cc: you). > > Or do you have a better way to determine who is the branch owner of a > particular branch? Top committer is fine.
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On Mon, 7 Nov 2016 at 19:40 Elena Stepanova
Hi,
On 11/07/2016 08:59 PM, Vicențiu Ciorbaru wrote:
Hi!
I'm wondering if it makes sense to have an automatic cleanup process for branches older than X months?
Please don't do that. It happens that some work is delayed for really long period of time. Neither the first (by date) nor the second (by MDEV status) list are suitable for the automatic process. The third one (branches that are fully merged) might be, but it should be considered carefully, I don't have sufficient git expertise to decide if it's reliable enough.
We can potentially add some exceptions for work that needs to stay.
How would it work? When you create a branch and work on something, you don't know yet that it would be delayed. Then it is, you think it's for a week maybe, switch to something else, and you won't remember to revisit the branch until the task comes back to life... Who would care about making it an exception, and when?
Alright, agreed. I was thinking of a way to make sure we don't end up with a million branches again, but you're right that it's each developer's job to clean up. Perhaps an automatic reminder after X months, once every Y months? (X == 6, Y == 1?) Vicentiu
2016-11-07 20:59 GMT+03:00 Vicențiu Ciorbaru
I'm wondering if it makes sense to have an automatic cleanup process for branches older than X months?
After few months / clock glitch it _could_ drop the entire repo :D I encourage people to use personal forks. Not merged -> does not exist.
participants (5)
-
Elena Stepanova
-
Kristian Nielsen
-
Sergey Vojtovich
-
Vicențiu Ciorbaru
-
Игорь Пашев