Delete merged branches or keep?

[PhDyellow]

@jaseeverett should we delete the merged branches from github to keep things clean?

I've been looking into Git practices, and there are a few schools. Some want to keep EVERYTHING, even though it makes things cluttered. Others take the time to clean up before pushing things to github.
My thought is that the "keep everything" approach will take less effort for scientists who are not developing large, complex programs with many collaborators. If we do break something, it won't affect thousands of people every minute.

Perhaps we don't delete branches. We can go further and ask people to only ever use MASTER. The git masters among us can make it look like they only ever use MASTER, while everyone else just uses MASTER. If we break something, just add another commit.

[jaseeverett]

At our workshop in Sweden we worked with a few Git experts. They were of the opinion you should delete the branch once it is merged. I think we go half way. The experts (admins) will clean up with the repos and delete the merged branches periodically but we don't require everyone to do it.

I just deleted your old branches in this repo.

[jaseeverett]

I need to devote some time to creating this Git workflow for the lab. I will come up in October sometime and we can all teach the lab how to do it.

The workflow we learnt in Sweden was:

1. Fork repo into personal Github (even admins),
2. Make changes
3. Submit pull request.
4. Admin checks, comments, approves.
5. Branch is deleted when merged.