Can I make one more argument against the "never throw anything away"
policy? Not only does it not really solve the cruft issue by just shoving
it under the sofa, it also means a new set of procedures have to be
established: what gets moved? How do I decide whether to stuff a thing
under the sofa or delete it? How much documentation does there need to be
for these things? I think it adds work and cognitive load when all we
really need to do is delete it. If someone wants to know how we did things
in 2012, they'll revert the repo to an appropriate commit and poke around.
If we do this, I bet in a few years the obsolete branch will get nuked
anyway. Because nobody will ever use it.
Still, if you really want to, at least I can ignore it :-).
On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Syd Bauman
It seems no one has *done* this yet. I think it's a really good idea.
I think Hugh is, in general, right -- it's OK to nuke stuff, that's why it's in a version control repository. That said, in the TEI universe where the cadre of those responsible for the repository changes over time, I'm more inclined to Martin's clever obsolete/ sibling of branches/, tags/, and trunk/. Besides, that way we could easily reverse the decision, and delete things from obsolete/. (Could reverse decision and recover deleted stuff if needed, too, but much harder.)
But IIRC (and I'd love to be wrong on this), it is not easy in Subversion to ascertain from where a directory was moved. So a check-in comment like "moved .../trunk/duck/quack/waddle/ to .../obsolete/waddle/" would be a good idea, no?
I'm happy to file a ticket, assign it to myself, and do this. I hate cruft.
True. But not everything needs to be kept in the attic. It's ok to get rid of stuff when it's no longer useful. -- tei-council mailing list tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
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