How do you remove a remote branch?

[Matt Nordhoff]

John Szakmeister wrote:
> On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Aaron Bentley <aaron at aaronbentley.com> wrote:
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>> John Szakmeister wrote:
> [snip]
>> I don't keep my branches in my working area.  They're in a shared
>> repository that I rarely look at directly.  Branches in a shared
>> repository are quite small (44K used).
> 
> It's not so much the size as the sheer quantity... and not knowing
> which are active and which are not.  As an example, I'm currently
> working on a codebase that has a number of active branches (>100).
> Things get merged, and then they're no longer active.  Of the course
> of a year, we may have 1000 or so.  Perhaps we have to take a
> different strategy on how to go about doing long feature development
> branches.  It's nice to have them all co-located in the same place,
> but maybe we need to move away from that?  I dunno.  I guess that's
> the big difference between how you operate, and how we'd like to
> operate: we want to make sure code is not lost.  So, we need to put it
> somewhere where people know about it, where it's backed up, and where
> folks can find it easily.  We'd like to do that without building new
> tools to do it.

For what it's worth, that's a nice feature of Launchpad: you can mark
branches as merged or abandoned so they won't be displayed in the
default listings but you don't have to delete them.

E.g., look at the difference between these two pages:

<https://code.edge.launchpad.net/bzr>
<https://code.edge.launchpad.net/bzr?field.lifecycle=MERGED>

(Of course, some people never do mark their branches as merged, so the
listings get polluted anyway.)

Like I said, "for what it's worth". You said you don't want to build new
tools, and I doubt your company wants to outsource their bzr hosting to
Launchpad, but I felt like mentioning it.

[snip]
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