[p4] Branch deprecation procedure?

[Robert Cowham]

> Now as far as the material on the branch itself, I see these 
> options ahead of me:
> 1) Do nothing -- leave the branch there.
> 2) Add an entry to the protections table to mark it read-only
> 3) Delete (p4 delete) the branch
>
> I don't like #1 because it leaves a folder around that over 
> time, will add to the noise of obsoleted branch folders when 
> browsing the depot.

I always recommend that you do something simple like insert a year component
in the pathname, e.g.

Instead of:

	//depot/Product/SOME_DEV_BRANCH/...

You do:

	//depot/Product/2007/SOME_DEV_BRANCH/...

(using Laura's naming convention of uppercase branchnames - though I do find
things like a suffix .br work very well too, and don't lead to confusion
with acronyms etc).

This convention for development type branches, of which you may end up
having many over the years, means it is obvious when something is a couple
of years old and unlikely to be of interest.

It can also work with release type branches - depends on how many you are
going to have.

The key thing here is that I want to avoid clicking at one level in the GUI
and having potentially hundreds of items (e.g. branches) at that level. Over
time this becomes very messy, and does impact performance.

> Option #2 sounds interesting as it will essentially hide it, 
> but I worry about doing this for every branch that ends up 
> deprecated -- if the protections table grows large, it can 
> negatively impact performance.

Covered by others.

> Option #3 sounds somewhat drastic, but still recoverable.

Again this can still cause problems if there are hundreds of things at that
level, as depending on the GUI options to view deleted files or not will
depend on what you can see.

Robert