Subversion: deleting old feature branches vs. keeping them

branchsvnversion control

I have a subversion repository with the standard layout, i.e. trunk/ and branches/ (and tags/). When working on a bigger change, a feature branch is used, regularly synced with trunk, and later reintegrated back into trunk (using 1.5 now). Pretty standard stuff.

What I am wondering is whether such a feature branch, once finished and merged should be kept around, or deleted. The subversion book occasionally seems to suggest that it is common to delete them, but I've also seen a bunch of Open Source projects which do keep the branches.

I am also somewhat concerned about how deleting a branch will make it harder to keep track of which branches existed, especially when potentially duplicate names enter the scenario (say we search-refactor twice), their commit histories disappearing somewhere in the depth of the repository etc.

On the other hand, branches are used quite a lot, especially with 1.5 now, and I do like the thought of not having to poke through a large list of inactive branches to find the ones I am currently working on.

What are the pros and cons that I am missing? What are people doing?

Best Answer

If you are really worried about deleting them, lest they be forgotten, then simply create a folder under branches called 'inactive' and svn move your older, inactive branches into that folder. This might be the best of both worlds for you.

Merge trunk into a branch / tag

Checkout the branch / tag
Right-click on the root of the branch | Tortoise SVN | Merge ...
Merge Type: Merge a range of revisions | Click 'Next'
Merge revision range: Select the URL of the trunk directory that you copied to the branch / tag. Enter the revisions to merge or leave the field empty to merge all revisions | click 'Next'
Merge options: I just left these as default | click 'Merge'
This will merge the revisions into the checked out branch / tag
Then commit the merged changes to the branch / tag

Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Using TortoiseSVN how to merge changes from the trunk to a branch and vice versa

Merge trunk into a branch / tag

Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

How do you create a new project/repository?

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