Comment by hinkley
8 days ago
> Main then has a nice single commit with a reference to the branch it came from if you wish to see how it developed.
Yeah sorry that's a toy project. You have 50 people push commits for six years and see if those branches don't 'accidentally' get deleted. We need a different VCS tool to get what you're after there.
GitHub, Gitea, and Forgejo specifically store all commit hashes for PRs in the `refs/pull/` namespace. The end result is that 50 people pushing commits for six years and deleting all of their branches after squash-and-merge loses no information about how the code evolved.
The main branch remains compact with a linear history without the commit noise. Deleted branches can be restored, commits that otherwise do not exist in the history can be interacted with, and so on.
One of our repos at work (56 contributors) still has all the original branch commits visible on PRs that were squashed and merged in 2018, I've never noticed anything like that being deleted accidentally or otherwise.