[Infrastructure] GitHub Branch Cleanup

[Ryan Sleevi]

Let's first talk about your goals, before we settle on implementation.

What's your particular goal? The whole reason we switched to Git was to
have an unambiguous history. That history is preserved through Git itself,
so in the stable case - e.g. a ballot is accepted - the thing we want to
preserve is the change itself, and that can still be and is preserved.

If the goal is something different, we should nail down what that is. For
example, we've already touched on how to unambiguously ensure there are no
modifications during or following the voting, which is the previous concern
that had been articulated. We haven't guaranteed that Forum infrastructure
items are preserved (for example, the loss of our Wiki editing history
during the system migration in 2017), nor have we preserved all the
attachments that used to be distributed through the Wiki itself, so I can't
imagine it's just to preserve the links.

If you can articulate the scenario you want to preserve, and the set of
concerns, then that will help us figure out how best to accommodate that.

For example, the nice thing about the GitHub approach is that you can
reliably verify the pull request is what was actually integrated and
committed.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 12:00 PM Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) <
dzacharo at harica.gr> wrote:

> I have some general concerns about loosing the "immutable" redline version
> that we vote on. If someone deletes a branch (private fork or in the
> cabforum), the immutable link to the redline that was voted on will be
> broken.
>
> If this is true, then I think we need to have an improved process where a
> private fork is "copied" back to the cabforum/documents repo, and made
> read-only or something. Of course I am not a git expert so I'm asking here
> to get some reassurances that deleting branches will not create
> unintentional gaps.
>
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