Re: Marking abandoned branches

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

>> Dear diary, on Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 05:17:59PM CEST, I got a letter
>> where Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> said that...
>> > Abandoned branches are common in CVS since it is not distributed.
>> > People start working on something in the main repo and then decide it
>> > was a bad idea. In the git world these branches usually don't end up
>> > in the main repo.
>> 
>> Can't you just toss the branch away in that case? :-)
>> 
>> You could also stash the ref to refs/heads-abandoned/ instead of
>> refs/heads/ if you want to keep the junk around for some reason. Of
>> course you don't get the nice marker with explanation of why is this
>> abandoned and who decided that, but you can just use an empty commit for
>> the same purpose.
>
> ... or a tag (remember, you can stash a tag into refs/abandoned/, instead 
> of a commit) with the further benefit that you really cannot commit on top 
> of that.

Using tag has an added benefit that you now have a place to say
why you dropped it.  So what we would need to support this is an
agreed-upon name under $GIT_DIR/refs/ that is omitted from
display by convention across Porcelains (the core side should
not ignore them because even when you are abandoning them, you
do not want to lose them),