Hi Brane, I hadn't joined the project back then, so I don't know the history, but my guess is that the loss of traceability might have occurred as a result of importing the code from an external repository. I don't see why they could be attributed to branch deletion – probably I'm not feeling creative enough today ;-)
The current prohibition seems to be temporary. There's was fragility in the current scenario – since any committer could delete any Git head from the repo, including fundamental ones which should be protected by all means: master, develop, maintenance streams, etc. So if a dev accidentally deleted master, and you were unlucky enough that the Git server decided to run gc between then and the time you tried to recover from reflog, you could be pretty screwed. Well – not so much, because presumably other devs would be having local copies of master and could re-push them. But it's still a hardcore vulnerability! In Ignite, the branches we create to implement JIRA issues originate from our ASF Git repo itself, so traceability is feasible at all times. A different story would be to pull from a remote repo (Github – this could be problematic in terms of IP) into the ASF. In my opinion, Board does need to regulate that, because using GH for pull requests may lead to some dubious situations with regards to IP. (I can elaborate if you guys are interested to discuss). Regards, *Raúl Kripalani* PMC & Committer @ Apache Ignite, Apache Camel | Integration, Big Data and Messaging Engineer http://about.me/raulkripalani | http://www.linkedin.com/in/raulkripalani http://blog.raulkr.net | twitter: @raulvk
