Any benefit keeping old branches on GitHub?

Question

My team has already merged branches of a project into master and deployed the changes. Our DevOps guy is wondering whether there's any benefit in keeping those old remote branches on GitHub.

Is there any metadata in a branch that is lost once it's deleted after being merged into another branch?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '12 at 16:03

4

A branch is only a name that points to a commit. Deleting branches that have been merged into master (or equivalent) loses no information.

answered Oct 17 '12 at 16:03

opqdonut

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score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

2

You must tag before deleting so that a reference to the branch is retained. Once deleted, it will no longer show up in your list of branches, but will still be accessible if necessary via the tag.

See this answer here: Git branch deletion

edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

Community

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answered Oct 17 '12 at 20:00

tmichaelrogers

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Any benefit keeping old branches on GitHub?

2 Answers2