Comment by usrnm

That is very different from my experience with git. I know that the kernel uses branches a lot, but that's probably because of git's history with the project. At every company I worked git is used exactly the same way as CVS or SVN was used many years ago: you make some local changes, you push these local changes to the central store, you forget about it. Branches make local switching between tasks easier, but apart from that nobody cares about branches and they're definitely not treated as an important part of the repo. In fact, they're usually deleted immediately after the change is merged.