The Calcite git repository seems to be cluttered with unused branches. I am especially tired of 'maint-0.4.12', which is eleven years old but comes up every time I type 'git log origin/mai<TAB>'.
I analyzed our branches. There are 37 branches in origin (see https://github.com/apache/calcite/branches/all). 4 branches have a specific purpose: * HEAD (points to main) * main * master (deprecated, redirects to main) * site 29 release branches, prefixed either maint- or branch-: * branch-1.0 * branch-1.1 * ... * branch-1.24 * branch-avatica-1.8 * branch-avatica-1.9 * maint-0.4.12 * maint-0.4.15 3 seem to be orphans, pushed by mistake: * review * master * issue6607 1 is related to dependabot PR * dependabot/bundler/site/nokogiri-1.15.6 Of the 29 release branches, 26 might be called 'trivial'. They are direct ancestors of current HEAD and are exactly one commit after a tag, because that is how the Maven release process worked. For example branch-1.12 is one commit after the tag calcite-1.12.0: $ git log --abbrev-commit --pretty=format:'%h -%d %s (%cr) <%an>' -n3 origin/branch-1.12 0f92251082 - (origin/branch-1.12) [maven-release-plugin] prepare for next development iteration (8 years ago) <Julian Hyde> ea7ace18cd - (tag: calcite-1.12.0) [maven-release-plugin] prepare release calcite-1.12.0 (8 years ago) <Julian Hyde> baa13d696f - [CALCITE-1657] Release Calcite 1.12.0 (8 years ago) <Julian Hyde> The 3 other release branches might be called 'maintenance branches', because they are several commits away from the main branch. They are: * maint-0.4.12 (5,459 commits behind and 20 ahead of main) * maint-0.4.15 (5,431 commits behind and 4 ahead of main) * branch-1.22 (1,869 commits behind and 1 ahead of main) I propose to delete the 26 trivial release branches and rename the maintenance branches: * maint-0.4.12 becomes release/0.4.12 * maint-0.4.15 to release/0.4.15 * branch-1.22 to release/1.22. I will not delete any tags. And I will not do anything until release 1.38 is complete. Any thoughts on this? Julian
