Restrict creating new branches in Autoware.Universe

[mitsudome-r]

Background

When developers create pull requests to Autoware.Universe, I see many of them creating their feature/fix branch in upstream autoware.universe repository. This ends up having 125 branches existing in the repository at the moment, which makes the cloning of autoware.universe unnecessarily slow.

The guideline for creating a pull request is to create from a fork, but we currently don't have systematic restrictions to create a branch to upstream.

Proposal

I would like to add a new ruleset which restricts creating a new branch under autowarefoundation/autoware.universe. If there are any reasons for creating a new branch in the upstream repo (for example for testing a pull request that updates CI pipeline), then they should ask the maintainers to create the branch.

Does anyone have any comments about this approach?

[mitsudome-r]

FYI, even if I add the rule right now, people should still be able to make pushes to their branch if they have an open PR using that branch.

[mitsudome-r]

I applied the rule. Only members from https://github.com/orgs/autowarefoundation/teams/autoware-admins is able to create branches from now on. If there are any issues, please let me know so that I can revert the setting.

[mitsudome-r]

I will pin the discussion for a week so that everyone would notice the change. I will unpin it after a while.

[idorobotics]

Will existing branches, not created by maintainers, be merged or removed (if inactive)?

[mitsudome-r]

I'm planning to go through them and check if they can be removed.

[mitsudome-r]

I have noticed that the slow cloning of autoware.universe comes from https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware.universe/tree/gh-pages. The branch has a very long commit history since it is updated by GitHub bots when there is a PR makes changes to documentation.

As a short term solution, I can remove all commit history, but we should also consider splitting the branch into a separate repository as a long term solution.