A proposed solution (Was: nicer frontend to get rebased tree?)

Maybe what we need is a way in git to advertise that a particular branch, when pulled into another repository, shouldn't be used as a base for someone else to do development. The only question is what can we do other than give a warning if someone tries to create a local branch which tracks such a branch. One thought is to have a git config option which will forbid creating local branches that track an "rebase-unstable" branch, on the theory that the best thing to do with such workloads is to either use them as sources for "git merge" or a git checkout creating a detached HEAD.

Once you've merged a rebase-unstable remote branch into a local branch, the resulting local branch could be treated "contaminated" such that if the user tries to do any commits on such a local branch, git issues a warning that you are committing changes onto a branch which should be considered throwaway.

I guess the real question is whether we should be encoding quite this much policy into git. I think it would help make it easier to advertise what is considered the preferred workflow, and if it can all be turned off with a git-config option, people who don't want it can always turn it off.

What do folks think?

						- Ted