A question about shared repositories

[Talden]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 9:22 AM, David Allouche <david at allouche.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 9:02 PM, Chris Tavares <cct at tavaresstudios.com> wrote:
>   > What happens when you delete a branch from a shared repository? Once I'm
>   > done with my work on a particular topic and merged back into main, I don't
>   > see a reason to hold onto that specific branch anymore. If I just delete the
>   > directory, is that all I need to do? Will there be anything left over in the
>   > shared repository?
>
>   The actual revision data will remain in the shared repository, since a
>   branch in a shared repository is (mostly) just a pointer to a revision
>   id.
>
>   If you use a shared repository, that usually means that you regularly
>   merge from main into this repository. If the branch was merged into
>   main before being deleted, it does not matter that the revision data
>   remains when the branch is deleted: if revision data were removed too,
>   it would have to be downloaded again when merging from main.
>
>   In short: deleting a branch in a shared repository does not delete the
>   actual version control data, but it does not make a difference in the
>   end, unless your intent is to erase the data from the world.

Perhaps a 'prune' that you could use in conjunction with heads to
prune out branches that might contain abandoned speculative work that
may consume considerable space.  If you later pull something with
those revisions again they'll come back of course but in that case
you'd be pulling into an existing branch and the merge revision would
tie the revisions back into some useful mainline.

--
Talden