The need for this comes about as follows:
- a project may allow its developers "RWC" (or "RW+C") so that they
can create feature branches when needed. Note that these are
*feature* branches, so they can't use the "personal branches"
mechanism that gitolite already has.
- the developers are *not* given RWCD (or RW+CD) to prevent accidental
deletion of an important branch. Branch *deletion* is something
that only a few trusted admins can do.
- as a result, there are sometimes situations where a developer
creates a misnamed branch and then has to ask the admins to help get
rid of it.
What the KDE folks wanted was a way to allow the creator of a branch to
be able to delete it. In addition, they needed this allowed only for a
fixed duration after the creation of a branch, not forever (for the same
reason they don't get RWCD, to prevent accidents).
These are my reasons why this feature is implemented as an ADC instead
of being "in core":
- we'd need additional syntax to differentiate this special case
(which is sort of in between RWC and RWCD, if you think about it).
I'm reluctant to complicate the syntax further for something that is
only occasionally needed.
- we'd need either (a) code to parse the log files, or, (b) code to
maintain "who created this ref" on every push that creates a ref.
- parsing the log files is too kludgy and inelegant to be in core,
not to mention potentially very slow for really large projects
- code to maintain the a history of "who created this ref" is too
cumbersome, especially because of the need to expire old entries
after a time.
