119 Branches of Changes
4,628 Commits. 119 Branches. 84.3 GBs of storage.
Starting culture is an ever-growing issue.
It seems open-source projects suffer the most from having ideas and implementations started only later to be dropped and never returned too. This mentality leads to projects that look as if it encompasses a large amount of work but really has little meaningful progress.
This fake work ethic of open-sourced projects does bring more people in to contribute, but what is the purpose if it doesn’t lead to meaningful work being accomplished.
The specific repository I saw had a branch list containing approximately 30 visibly active branches. That leaves 89 branches that have not had work on them in a multitude of months. Diving deeper into these inactive branches we have some that have only had several commits, most of which weren’t meaningful changes and reduced the quality of the code.
Now, if these changes happened to be useful to the projects cause they would’ve received the work ethic of many developers and had meaningful progress, but they didn’t. Now they sit there collecting dust and bloating the repository.
When did we decide leaving these senseless branches resting dormant would be good for a project. Old branches should be evaluated and terminated if they don’t bring anything beneficial to the project.
If you have an idea, follow this simple diagram to decide whether or not you should follow through on it.
All of this is a call to action for anyone involved in an open-source project. Please make sure your project is clean and gives an accurate representation of its current status. This is an issue every open-source project is facing. With the correct mindset change, we can make a dent in cleansing, our repositories, and attitude to startup culture.
Sure starting something new is exciting, but creating something meaningful is even better.
