Archiving Git branches as tags
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Archiving Git branches as tags
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Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#2Seems like a sensible way to archive branches. It's not like a tag and branch are actually very different anyway, right? A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit while a branch is a pointer that follows commits forward. And for something that's archived, you don't need the pointer updating mechanism.
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#3How often did you go back to the archived tagches that are older than say, 6 months ? Seems very niche, unless dunno, there are no version tags in the repo.
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#4Seems like a sensible way to archive branches. It's not like a tag and branch are actually very different anyway, right? A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit while a branch is a pointer that follows commits forward. And for something that's archived, you don't need the pointer updating mechanism.
> A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit
It's not guaranteed not to change. The UI just makes it harder to update.
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#5How often did you go back to the archived tagches that are older than say, 6 months ? Seems very niche, unless dunno, there are no version tags in the repo.
True. At work our flow is to tag commits that we want to mark as release candidates and delete feature branches after their PRs are merged/declined. We've never had a need to archive branches.
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#6How often did you go back to the archived tagches that are older than say, 6 months ? Seems very niche, unless dunno, there are no version tags in the repo.
True. At work our flow is to tag commits that we want to mark as release candidates and delete feature branches after their PRs are merged/declined. We've never had a need to archive branches.
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.
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#7Seems like a sensible way to archive branches. It's not like a tag and branch are actually very different anyway, right? A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit while a branch is a pointer that follows commits forward. And for something that's archived, you don't need the pointer updating mechanism.
> A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit It's not guaranteed not to change. The UI just makes it harder to update.
And anyone whose coworkers replace tags on a regular basis will be familiar with the following message from git when pulling changes:
would clobber existing tag
Really wish my coworkers would leave old tags as they were heh.
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#8How often did you go back to the archived tagches that are older than say, 6 months ? Seems very niche, unless dunno, there are no version tags in the repo.
True. At work our flow is to tag commits that we want to mark as release candidates and delete feature branches after their PRs are merged/declined. We've never had a need to archive branches.
if you're deleting branches then why would you need to archive them? What would you even archive if you're deleting them? My deeper question is why are you deleting them in the first place though?
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. At work our flow is to tag commits that we want to mark as release candidates and delete feature branches after their PRs are merged/declined. We've never had a need to archive branches.
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 seco…
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.
Re: Archiving Git branches as tags
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. At work our flow is to tag commits that we want to mark as release candidates and delete feature branches after their PRs are merged/declined. We've never had a need to archive branches.
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 seco…
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.