[NOTICE] Old git branches will be pruned on Monday

[Jan Høydahl <ja...@cominvent.com>]

Hi,

With the new solr.git repo up and running, targeted at v9.0 and beyond, we (Uwe, Dawid and I) like to get rid of some clutter.

We  discussed on Slack and later on dev@lucene list[1] the option of pruning all the 113 git brances, where just a few are still active. It makes no sense to keep stale branch_x_y branches in solr.git repo, as they may be updated in lucene-solr.git. it only gives room for developer mistakes. If branch_8_8 does not exist in solr.git repo, noone will push to it, and rather remember to make a patch for lucene-solr.git instead.

So my plan is to remove all branches in the new solr.git repostiory and leave only the "main" branch and the reference_impl and reference_impl_dev branches.

We'll do this by replacing each with a git tag, e.g. branch_8x will be replaced with tag history/branches/lucene-solr/branch_8x. This is the same procedure we did when moving from svn to git. No history is lost!

If we continue using the central repo for personal branches, it will not only clutter the repo as we forget to delete them after merging, but it also causes unnecessary extra email traffic to the lists (e.g. "main branch merged into some jira/solr-xxx branch"). Therefore I encourage all committers to work on features in a private fork instead of pushing your branches to the central repository "svn style". Central branches are of course good for larger collaborative efforts and refactorings.

The script I intend to run on Monday can be inspected here https://gist.github.com/janhoy/80a7eea6bacd4e32646a7958d1e9a870. You will see that I have commented out reference_impl along with 25 jira/SOLR-xxx branches that have been active last 3 months. Those can be removed later.

Should you have a work-in-progress on a branch currently scheduled for removal, please reply here to excempt it from removal until it is merged.

The removal of these branches will happen on Monday March 15th. After the removal you can run "git fetch --prune origin" to not see the remote branches in your local clone.

PS: The lucene-solr.git repo, where 8.x development continues, will not be affected. Nor will lucene.git - that will be a separate pruning.

[1] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rc5ac744aa8b081e1e0edb17281d7bb42398a04dcaf6f47421e4a6c41%40%3Cdev.lucene.apache.org%3E