On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 09:37:26AM -0800, Jeffrey Marans wrote: > Thanks for the details, and your patience. > I think I'm going to have to read the manual
Unfortunately, the manual is, well, a reference. It means it is *precise* but is as fun to read as a judge's ruling, and this means people naturally tend to skim over certain bits which might turn out to be useful. So it's advised to first read a book and/or a number of HOWTOs and the like, which are way more fun to read. Digesting a manual page then becomes simpler as you're reading what you already know and so you're able to pay attention to the details which would stand out naturally when reading. > and digest way more of it before I stop asking simple questions. > > Given that changes were merged to and from master to PWBs, will deleting > the latter alter the contents of the former?\ Branches and tags are just symbolic references so deleting them does not touch the objects they point to. *But* one think to be aware of: a piece of history might become unreachable when you delete a symbolic link to its tip, and there's nothing else in the repository (such as a commit) which references that same tip; in this case this unreachable piece will eventually be garbage-collected and thus deleted. In simpler words, if one of your PWBn braches has something not merged to somewhere else, deleting it will make you lose that unmerged history. The `git branch -d` command actually fails to proceed unless the history of the branch you're attempting to delete is contained in some other reachable history, forcing you to pass `git branch` the -D option instead. So if in the repo you used to do the conversions, your PWBn branches have been happily deleted with just "-d", everything is okay so far. --
