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what is an "active branch"?

Asked by Alexandre Fayolle - camptocamp

I have a shared repository with a trunk branch. I created a new branch to work on a bug fix, and merged that branch in the trunk. Now I would like to remove the bug fix branch from my hard drive. There is a bzr rmbranch command which looks like what I'm looking for, bug when I try it, I get a strange error message:

  bzr: ERROR: Branch is active. Use --force to remove it.

I don't want to mess things up. The documentation for that command is terse and not very helpful in this case. And the user manual does not say much about removing branches working trees after they've been used.

So this is 4 questions:

1. how can I tell that a branch is active?
2. how can I "deactivate" a branch?
3. is it safe to use bzr rmbranch --force on my branch?
4. should I not bother and just rm -rf the working tree for the branch?

Thanks in advance

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Martin Packman (gz) said : 		#1

This is probably a confusing side-effect of fixing bug 922953 which is about colocated branches. In that context, the "active branch" is the one that the working tree currently corresponds to, and there may be other branches in the same location that are safe to remove.

For your case, with a merged feature branch, either passing --force or just removing the directory is fine. What I tend to do (given I work in a treeless shared repo) is just mv the branches under 'merged' when I've finished with them.

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