Hi Accumulo devs, I just wanted to give you a heads up about branch maintenance for the 2.1 branch. A few mistakes were made, and the main branch accidentally got merged backwards into the 2.1 maintenance branch instead of the other way around. In order to fix this and not have the history completely unintelligible, I force-pushed the 2.1 maintenance branch back to the commit just prior. It was just the single merge commit that grabbed the main branch that needed to be removed to fix things in the 2.1 branch. Only the 2.1 branch was affected. The main branch did not need to be corrected so drastically. But, after I fixed the 2.1 branch, I did merge it forward into the main branch as per our usual procedure, to complete the original task that was being attempted.
tl;dr - If you're curious, the relevant tickets were #3082, #3101, and #3102. #3082 was the original ticket adding a feature to 2.1.1. #3101 correctly reverted it from the 2.1 branch. This revert was then attempted to be merged into the main branch. That was done as a separate PR in #3102. For what it's worth, I don't recommend doing merges using the GitHub UI that way. GitHub assumes you're combining the history of both branches fully into a single resulting branch, instead of merely incorporating one branch into the other. This assumption caused several problems. The first is the presence of a very risky "delete" button suggesting the 2.1 branch can be deleted when we don't want it to be deleted. The second, and more troublesome problem that caused the issues we needed to fix, was that GitHub's conflict resolution UI will merge all of the main branch into the 2.1 branch during conflict resolution, because it believes you're merely bringing the 2.1 branch up-to-date with main in order to merge a feature branch into main and remove the feature branch. It assumes a feature branch workflow, not a maintenance branch, one-way merge, workflow. In order to avoid problems like this in future, I recommend merging into the main branch from the maintenance branches by using the command-line. `git mergetool` is your friend :) I hope this explanation helps others understand what happened and how to avoid similar issues with GitHub in future. Regards, Christopher Tubbs
