Re: Branches without a magic branch number

[Jon Smirl]

On 6/17/06, Jon Smirl <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 6/17/06, Rick Genter <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On a repository of that size, longevity and disparate user-set, it wouldn't
> > surprise me if someone, at some time in the past, simply deleted the tag
> > (tag -d). The revisions would still exist, of course, but there would be no
> > way to get to the tip of the branch. Presumably someone would have tagged
> > the tip of the branch before deleting the magic branch tag in case they
> > *did* want to get back to it, but then the only reasonable thing you could
> > do would be to form a new branch off of that tag.
>
> It has happened 680 times by a lot of different people. Tools that
> export the repository are detecting these unnamed branches. The
> branches are being reconstructed by correlating the commit comments.
>
> There are 1,800 branches in the repository, that would imply that 1/3
> of them had the magic tag removed manually.

The 680 number may be too high. The tool that is detecting these
doesn't necessarily get everything grouped back into a single branch
that belongs in that branch. So a single missing tag could cause the
tool to report a 100 extra branches if it is having trouble
correlating. I haven't checked everything manually so I don't know how
bad this problem is.

--
Jon Smirl
address@hidden