[RFC] Cleaning up automake branches

[Stefano Lattarini]

Hello automakers.

A look at:

  <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/refs/heads>

shows that it's probably time to tie up some loose ends there, by removing
redundant branches, and turning old and unactive ones into tags.

Here is my proposals:

  * I suggest to turn the branches `master-UNNAMED-BRANCH-UNNAMED-BRANCH'
    and `master-UNNAMED-BRANCH' into tags, whose names are to be given
    by the strings returned by `git-describe'.

  * The branch `branch-real-1-5' points to an ancestor commit (grandfather
    commit, more specifically) of `branch-1-5', so we can just remove it.

  * The branches `branch-1-x' (for x = 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are all old and
    inactive, the last commit in all of them being the security fix related
    to CVE-2009-4029; I propose to turn them all into proper tags; any
    suggestion for which the best names for such tags would be?

  * The branch `user-dep-gen-merge-branch' is an quite-near ancestor of
    `user-dep-gen-branch', and long long inactive (~ 13 years), so I
    propose to remove it.

  * The branch `user-dep-gen-branch' is untouched by ~12 years; I propose
    to transform it into a tag (suggested name: `old-user-dep-gen').

  * The branch `je-silent', implementing silent-rules support in automake,
    has been since long merged into maint, and the features it provided
    have clearly become part of the automake core.  So I think we can
    safely delete it.

Opinions, objections?

Regards,
  Stefano