Git Protocol

You can still get the surrounding context of a commit and still delete the branch. Each merge commit has multiple parent commits. A branch is just another form of commit-ish and the second parent is the tip of the original branch at the time of the merge. It's actually more telling than what a branch would give you. Branches change over time, but commit-ishes are forever :smile:.

I would also argue that there is an expense in not deleting branches. In a system with many branches, it's starts to get very cluttered. If we clean up after ourselves, we should almost be able to look at the branches in a repo and be able to get a high level view of who is working on what.