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Archiving Git Branches as Tags

https://etc.octavore.com/2025/12/archiving-git-branches-as-tags/
37•octavore•3d ago

Comments

ziml77•1h ago
Seems like a sensible way to archive branches. It's not like a tag and branch are actually very different anyway, right? A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit while a branch is a pointer that follows commits forward. And for something that's archived, you don't need the pointer updating mechanism.
progval•1h ago
> A tag is a pointer that always refers to the same commit

It's not guaranteed not to change. The UI just makes it harder to update.

QuantumNomad_•51m ago
And anyone whose coworkers replace tags on a regular basis will be familiar with the following message from git when pulling changes:

would clobber existing tag

Really wish my coworkers would leave old tags as they were heh.

toenail•30m ago
A hook should be able to prevent that
PunchyHamster•1h ago
How often did you go back to the archived tagches that are older than say, 6 months ? Seems very niche, unless dunno, there are no version tags in the repo.
yawaramin•1h ago
True. At work our flow is to tag commits that we want to mark as release candidates and delete feature branches after their PRs are merged/declined. We've never had a need to archive branches.
phire•55m ago
It seems very useful for archiving branches that never got merged.

Sometimes I work on a feature, and it doesn’t quite work out for some reason or another. The branch will probably never get merged, but it’s still useful for reference later when I want to see what didn’t work when taking a second attempt.

Currently, those abandoned branches have been polluting my branch list. In the past I have cloned the repo a second time just to “archive” them. Tags seem like a better idea.

dotancohen•39m ago
I sometimes leave merged branches around for quite a while, because I squash them when I merge to master and sometimes when tracking down a bug the ability to bisect very handy.
skydhash•37m ago
I don’t think I’ve ever returned to a branch that I can easily rebase on top of the main branch. And if I really wanted to, I’d prefer to extract a patch so that I can copy the interesting lines.

Any branch older than 6 months is a strong candidate for deletion.

fragmede•44m ago
if you're deleting branches then why would you need to archive them? What would you even archive if you're deleting them? My deeper question is why are you deleting them in the first place though?
tonymet•18m ago
IMO a cleaner way to do this is with a headless remote, either on disk or “backed up” on a server. `git push —-all` won’t delete refs on the remote, so you don’t have to do any additional work to record or recover them.

`git push —all backup` will record all of your refs and tags

If you are archiving branches in your own rep, prefix with `ar/` so you can grep -v to conceal them.

See also `git notes` to record metadata an against a commit without changing the commit

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