There's delete-wmf-branches from T244368, but I was pretty sure we had a better one somewhere that handled the tag conversion.

@dancy or @thcipriani does this ring any bells I'm forgetting about?

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/tools/release/+/683934 is where we modified branch.py to create a tag named after the branch before deleting the branch.

One can inspect all extensions and skins by cloning the mono repositories mediawiki/extensions and mediawiki/skins (warning: huge). I ran a little script to find the oldest branch on each repo:

#!/bin/bash
oldest=$(git branch -lr --sort=version:refname 'origin/wmf/*'|head -n1)
if [ -n "$oldest" ]; then
    printf "| %s | %s\n" "$(basename "$(pwd)")" "${oldest/  /}"
fi

Did a prune of all remote branches with git submodule foreach git remote prune origin

Then git -C ~/projects/mediawiki/extensions submodule foreach -q ../earliest-wmf-branch yields:

Skins

Extensions

Change 771955 had a related patch set uploaded (by Hashar; author: Hashar):

[mediawiki/tools/release@master] make-release: add test for delete_branch

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/771955

Change 771956 had a related patch set uploaded (by Hashar; author: Hashar):

[mediawiki/tools/release@master] make-release: abort branch deletion if tag failed

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/771956

I have looked at the make-release/branch.py script and it has support to delete old branches. Unfortunately while reading the code and testing it (with --noop) I found several issues with errors handling. Notably:

• when the tag fails to be created, we still delete the branch
• a non existing branch on one of the repo abort the script execution (so it is not rentrant when processing a bundle)

I have added some tests and made a change to prevent deleting a branch when the tag failed to create. That is a start.

Another one is that repositories which are no more deployed to Wikimedia are unknown to the branch.py script and would thus never have their old wmf branches collected.

There was also a concern about tags piling up, I guess we can move them to refs/attic/tags/* so we still have them around if needed. But that is a different discussion.

Change 771955 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/tools/release@master] make-release: add test for delete_branch

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/771955

Change 771956 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/tools/release@master] make-release: abort branch deletion if tag failed

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/771956

Change 773504 had a related patch set uploaded (by Hashar; author: Hashar):

[mediawiki/tools/release@master] make-release: hardened branch existence detection

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/773504

Change 773504 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/tools/release@master] make-release: hardened branch existence detection

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/773504

I currently have the following aliases (dotfiles repo):

	# Wildcard deletion of remote branches
	#
	# Usage: git remote-wildcard-br-d 'wmf/1.36*'
	# Usage: git remote-<tab>
	#
	# Inspired by <https://stackoverflow.com/q/3670355/319266>
	#
	# Note that git-push requires its branch argument to be without the
	# localised "refs/remotes/origin" prefix. As such, we strip that off.
	#
	# $ git branch -rl 'origin/wmf/1.36*' --format '%(refname)'
	# $ git branch -rl 'origin/wmf/1.36*' --format '%(refname:lstrip=3)'
	# $ git push origin --delete
	#
	remote-wildcard-br-d = "!f() { git branch -rl \"origin/$1\" --format '%(refname:lstrip=3)' | xargs git push origin --delete; }; f"

And have removed the old branches again on various repos including mediawiki/core, so as to de-clutter interfaces such as the "Cherry pick" dialog etc

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-releng) [2022-08-16T19:17:38Z] <Krinkle> mediawiki/extensions/Scribunto$ git remote-wildcard-br-d 'wmf/1.35*' # ref T303828

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-releng) [2022-09-06T00:20:09Z] <Krinkle> Prune various old mediawiki/core wmf branches for Gerrit usability, ref T303828

The branch are no more cleaned since T218783 which moved the logic behind a feature flag (scap clean --delete-gerrit-branch) due to some weird breakage related to ssh auth socket. If that T218783 is investigated again and fixed, that would clean out the old branch and I solve this one.