On 2016-04-22 12:27:06 -0700, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> I'm hardly a Mercurial expert either, but closed branches are still
> around,
Well, that's a VCS, so that's normal that there are some traces.
Otherwise you need an unversioned concept, such as bookmarks.
> and they even show up in 'hg branches':
No, according to "hg help glossary":
Head, closed branch
A changeset that marks a head as no longer interesting. The
closed head is no longer listed by 'hg heads'. A branch is
considered closed when all its heads are closed and
consequently is not listed by 'hg branches'.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> you can see the old closed 'stable' branch still in our repos.
$ hg branches
[...]
stable 6613:a6a4d6ed0f19 (inactive)
mutt-1-2-stable 1835:8b0b9f06f1ba (inactive)
They are inactive, not closed. Again, according to "hg help glossary":
Branch, inactive
If a named branch has no topological heads, it is considered
to be inactive. As an example, a feature branch becomes
inactive when it is merged into the default branch. The 'hg
branches' command shows inactive branches by default, though
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
they can be hidden with 'hg branches --active'.
I think that all the branches except "default" and "stable" should
be closed with "hg commit --close-branch". The "stable" branch is
inactive just because the "default" branch is a descendent of it
(if I understand correctly). But it may get commits in the future
(e.g. security fixes), which will make it no longer inactive.
> Bookmarks may be an idea. Looking at the wiki page, it says bookmarks
> can be removed, but the commits still stay.
Yes, commits should stay. That's the goal of a VCS. But AFAIK, they
will not be in the way. So, as long as there are no major copyright
issues, I would see this as a feature.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
