RFC: advisory "branch_status" flag in branch.conf

[jbowtie at amathaine.com]

On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 1:07 AM, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
> That is a fair point. If the intention is just to let users hide branches,
> perhaps the semantic should just be "hide". On the other hand people may
> want to categorize them into under review, abandoned, etc. Perhaps it would
> be hard to have hardcoded behavior for those categories.
>

For what it's worth, Mercurial requires you to explicitly close named
branches (with the --close-branch option) in order to hide them,
Mercurial statuses are "active, inactive, closed" though I'm not sure
that the distinction between active and inactive is meaningful in the
way that Mercurial defines them.

>From my perspective, I'd be happy with [not set], "Merged", "Closed",
and "Experimental". Merged and Closed would be hidden in most contexts
by default, but distinguishing between them makes it easier to
integrate into a variety of workflows.  Being able to tag a branch as
experimental (versus a normal development branch) also seems to have
utility in most workflows I've seen.

I think those four statuses have very broad appeal against a wide
variety of workflows and are strong candidates for core branch
management tasks.

I think the namespaced config values are quite capable of handling
other types of categorization until such time as we want to move them
to core - and in that case we can continue supporting the old
namespace during a transition period.