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Comment by imroot | Hacker News Reader

I love Gitlab: both the product and the company. I really do.

With that said, I was really kinda upset that they enabled "Delete Merged Branch" by default in the last major release (9.2): it really caused a few days of headaches of reverting development/staging branches that developers and merge approvers approved.

I ended up writing a small Chrome plugin to uncheck the box, and distributed it to the developers that I work with before going in and learning enough angular to disable the box from being checked by default.

Sid; I have nothing but respect for you and the rest of gitlab, but, please don't change the behavior of how gitlab works (and yes, I understand convention over configuration) without giving either project or site administrators the ability to disable those changes.

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I would think it's a sensible default, but you're right, you should have the option to change it. I actually assumed the option was there, but I just checked in 9.3, and it's not.

I'm sorry to hear it caused problems. I think we can maybe make the behavior more intelligent, it should not delete longer running branches by default. We are very reluctant to add options to GitLab as detailed in point 11 of the acceptance criteria of our contributing guide https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CONTRIBU...

But if we can't make the behavior more intelligent we will probably have to add an option.

To give a different perspective. I always forgot to check the box, and now noticed a significant decrease in randomly left over branches. So it's working out pretty well for me.

It seems like it would be possible to have the best of both worlds by defaulting to checked for first PR from a branch, but defaulting to unchecked for subsequent PRs from the same branch (because if you didn't delete it last time, you probably don't want to delete it this time).

I think it's not bad to have it checked by default but a bit more intelligent it surely can be. The biggest annoyance and source of confusion is when you make a merge request based on a protected branch. The checkbox is still there and checked but it won't actually delete the protected branch (well, that's good ;-)).

In that case the checkbox should just be not displayed at all.

Or rather, displayed but disabled with a message explaining why it can't/won't be used.

Great suggestion, thanks!

Created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/34248 to track.

We've had the same issue with "Squash commits", which are now turned on by default.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/2541#note_329...

Thank you for the feedback. We're tracking how we can improve this functionality in this issue. Our design team is working hard on the merge request (the widget and the entire page) in general, and we are aiming to improve this part as part of that change.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32885

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