Code repositories are the final resting place for code, acting as equal parts bank vault, museum, and graveyard. Unlike a vault, content is almost always added faster than it is removed, but much like a graveyard, there is a definite miasma when a repository becomes too full. That smell is developer frustration, as they have to search through dozens, or eventually, hundreds of branches to find the one they want.

We’ve had sporadic cases where branches did not get merged into masters (and sometimes fixes were overwritten in later releases) and have wasted collectively hundreds of developer hours on “which branch is this in?” exchanges.

Sam and I talk about a simple yet helpful git tool to squash bad branches over at the Red Hat Developer Blog.