Currently old branches are still left as they are in cvs. This wastes disk space and traffic / time for many people that have to checkout branches that they do not have any interest in. Therefore I want to propose to remove any old branches from Fedora once the branching from devel to the new Fedora is done, i.e. remove all branches that are older than F-8 once F-10 is branched in HEAD. In case it is very complicated to get to the removed content in a cvs checkout of the package or there are a lot of people who need to access the contents, it would be nice to copy the old branches to some other cvs server, where everyone except the admins only has read access.
I'm not sure this is worth the benefit of splitting off the modules, and doing the copying to another storage space. If we run into an actual issue with disk space, we can reconsider.
Sorry, it seems that you missunderstood me. My suggestion was to remove old branches from HEAD, i.e. run "cvs rm" for them, so that a checkout of the branch, e.g. "cvs co pam_mount" will only checkout empty directories for the old branches or nothing in case one has added "-P" to cvs co. This makes it a lot faster for people to checkout a module. The archiving was only a followup suggestion in case there is a high demand to access these branches somehow else.
That's somewhat different, but I'm not sure blowing it away so there's no (apparent) history is a good idea. I wonder if scripts and infrastructure that may rely on 'dead.package' and similar mechanisms will run afoul of this.
Replying to [comment:3 notting]:
I would be very surprised, if it was, because 1) The UsingCvsFaq says, that one can do this for his own packages 2) New packages will never have a branch for EOL'ed releases 3) Checking every branch for every package in infrastructure scripts would slow down the process a lot. Also afaik the package EOL process includes to remove all contents except a dead.package and the dead.package can be still kept in the devel branch for packages that have been EOL'ed a long time ago
Just for a reference: Also for interested people it is pretty easy to use viewcvs to see the removed contents, e.g. with http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/pam_mount/FC-1/?hideattic=0
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/UsingCvsFaq#How_do_I_remove_a_branch_I_no_longer_want_or_need.3F
Oof, this has lingered for probably too long.
To summarize:
1) I don't see the need personally, but I wouldn't stand in the way if someone wants to do it. 2) This is probably a rel-eng issue as far as the implementation. Not sure if we can move the ticket sanely.
As such, closing as 'wontfix', in that I am not going to be doing this; if you want to sign up to help with branching to do this, we can discuss further (although I'd file the ticket against rel-eng, and we may want to discuss this on fedora-devel list.)
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