alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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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.
Wonder if it's worth squashing in the branch, merging to main, then immediately reverting.
Now the work is visible in history, branch can be deleted, and anyone in the future can search the ticket number or whatever if your commit messages are useful.
Dunno if it's worth polluting history, just thinking out loud.
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.