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Archiving Git branches as tags
- ziml77 10mo agoSeems like a sensible way to archive branches. It's not like a tag and branch are actually very different anyway, right? A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit while a branch is a pointer that follows commits forward. And for something that's archived, you don't need the pointer updating mechanism.
- progval 10mo ago> A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit It's not guaranteed not to change. The UI just makes it harder to update.
- QuantumNomad_ 10mo agoAnd anyone whose coworkers replace tags on a regular basis will be familiar with the following message from git when pulling changes: would clobber existing tag Really wish my coworkers would leave old tags as they were heh.
- toenail 10mo agoA hook should be able to prevent that
- monkpit 10mo agoHooks only keep honest people honest :) and an LLM will happily clobber a tag and skip hooks while the user just spams “accept”.
- mroche 10mo agoLuckily commonly used forges for collaboration have the ability to make tags immutable. Any repository where multiple people collaborate on a project should have that feature enabled by default. I'm still waiting for the day where tags are immutable by default with no option exposed to change it. I'm sure that would cause problems for some, but transitive labels already exist in Git: branches.
- MadnessASAP 10mo agoI dont find the idea of a immutable "descriptive" tag or branch to be that useful (I also dont find the differentiation of tags and branches to be useful either) I've seen plenty of repositories where tags end up being pretty ambiguous compared to each other or where "release-20xx" does not actually point to the official 20xx release. Immutable references are more typically handled by builders and lockfiles to which Git already has a superior immutable reference system, the commit hash.
- mroche 10mo agoI 100% agree on the latter (the tag != release is more of a project management issue), and the same concept applies to containers and their digest hashes. The main issue at the end of the day is the human one: most people don't like looking at hashes, nor do they provide context of progression. I would say "give both" and make sure they match on the end user side of things, but tags are the most common way (open source) software releases are denoted.
- Buttons840 10mo agoAs long as we can create and delete tags, they will never be immutable, right?
- mroche 10mo agoThe purpose of the forge is to be able to prevent this. Protected tags are usually a feature which provides a way to mark tags as untouchable, so removal would require a minimum level of trust to the repository on the platform. Otherwise, attempts to push tag deletions or changes for tags matching the protected pattern would be rejected/ignored. Of course, the repository owner has unlimited privilege here, hence the last part of my prior comment.
- Denvercoder9 10mo agoThat's true for local hooks, but neither a dishonest person nor an LLM can bypass a pre-receive hook on the server (as long as they don't have admin access).
- toenail 10mo agoThanks, apparently most people here aren't familiar with server-side hooks.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoCan't solve culture problems with technology, but we all know that by now, right?
- joneswilso 10mo ago[dead]
- az09mugen 10mo agoI have a somewhat different use case, where a work project has a moving "latest" tag. I discovered then the --force param with git fetch --tag
- paulddraper 10mo agoCorrect. One is refs/heads/<name> and the other is refs/tags/<name> Branches are expected to change. When a commit is authored, HEAD (the current branch) updates to that commit. Tags are expected not to change (though they can).
- lucasoshiro 10mo agoOther difference (actually, more like a consequence of what you said) is that Git keeps reflogs for branches but not for tags
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoHow often did you go back to the archived tagches that are older than say, 6 months ? Seems very niche, unless dunno, there are no version tags in the repo.
- yawaramin 10mo agoTrue. At work our flow is to tag commits that we want to mark as release candidates and delete feature branches after their PRs are merged/declined. We've never had a need to archive branches.
- phire 10mo agoIt 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.
- dotancohen 10mo agoI 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.
- matijsvzuijlen 10mo agoWhat made you decide to squash when merging instead of leaving the commits in the history so you can always bisect?
- quesera 10mo agoNot GP, but we do the same. Branches become the atomic unit of bisection in master, but the need is extremely rare. I think because we have good tests. We also keep merged branches around. This has never happened, but if we needed to bisect at the merged-branch level, we could do that. I know squash-merge isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I find it to be simpler and clearer for the 99+% case, and only slightly less convenient for the remainder.
- tonymet 10mo agoIMO a cleaner way to do this is with a headless remote, either on disk or “backed up” on a server. `git push —-all` won’t delete refs on the remote, so you don’t have to do any additional work to record or recover them. `git push —all backup` will record all of your refs and tags If you are archiving branches in your own rep, prefix with `ar/` so you can grep -v to conceal them. See also `git notes` to record metadata an against a commit without changing the commit
- derriz 10mo ago> Important note: the strange magic requires the official git completion script. I dislike the official git completion script because it’s so slow when working with large repos. On macOS - because of vagaries of the way its file system works - with large repos it’s effectively unusable. Hint to completion script writers: if your “smart” completion ever takes seconds, it’s worse than useless and far worse than “dumb” filename completion.
- AdieuToLogic 10mo agoOn a related note, git supports incorporating custom commands via executables available in the `PATH` having the naming convention of: git-<command name> Where "command name" in this case would be `archive-branch` and could be defined thusly: #!/bin/sh # git-archive-branch git_branch="${1:-$(git branch --show-current)}" git co main && git tag archive/$git_branch $git_branch && git branch -D $git_branch It then could be invoked the same as the alias: git archive-branch ...
- kazinator 10mo agoI don't see the point of this. A git branch is already a kind of tag. How about just # rename branch to archive/ prefix to indicate it is archived git branch -m foo-branch archive/foo-branch
- figmert 10mo agoBranches are expected to change, tags are not. Tags are also mildly harder to change. A tag seems more apt for an archived branch. So I sort of see where OP comes from.
- Zardoz84 10mo agoYeah. But WHY taging instead of renaming the branch ? I don't say if it is a good or bad idea. But I would like to know why.
- rolandog 10mo agoIf you read the article, it credits a reddit thread as the source of inspiration; the thread ultimately points to a StackOverflow answer [0] which may offer a better argument as to why they liked yo use this pattern. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1309934 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1309934
- cachvico 10mo agoYou can accidentally push to a branch. You can't accidentally push to a tag.
- MaulingMonkey 10mo agoFWIW, this is what I do, although typically with the prefix `dead/`, unto which I abandon ideas and misdirected refactoring with reckless abandon.
- kjksf 10mo agoBecause in git tooling (be it github.com or a tui/gui client like lazygit), git branches are shown more prominently because the expectation is that a branch is something you actively work on (if you're finished with a branch, you delete it). If you don't anticipate working on a branch but you want to preserve the code you leave it but it starts to clutter that prominent "active" space in most git tools. This allows you to preserve the code (if you ever want to look at it again) while also de-cluttering the prominent "branches" view.