Re: builtin-fetch code with messy history

Daniel Barkalow [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

 * when a branch config file section refers to a branches/* remote, the 
   merge setting is used (if one is given), even though this isn't useful 
   either way.

Maybe this is the right time to cut off branches/* and remotes/*?

It's not actually too difficult to support them, except for some weird 
combination cases that nobody would do anyway. I just made the remote.c 
config file parser generate the corresponding configurations from them, 
and the rest of the code doesn't have to care. The only oddity is that I 
had to support having a remote always auto-follow tags, even without 
tracking branches, because that's what branches/* did. But this is 
probably a reasonable thing to support as an option anyway.

We should support repositories with older layouts for an
eternity in git timescale (that is usually 6mo to a year) after
announcing that they are deprecated (which hasn't happened yet,
but I think everybody agrees that deprecating branches/ and
remotes/ is a sane thing to do in 1.6.0 or so).  Even if we give
clear migration path and script, having to convert them all at
once is a nuisance for the users.