I suspect GP knows this, but there's no way to go back and see what the branch ref was at a prior point in time. I believe they wish that refs themselves were versioned.

And yes, I know they're kept in the reflog. But that is short-lived and (I believe) local rather than eternal and global like everything else in git.

The reflog does exist on the server too, but it's not really accessible without access to the git repo on the server, so not much use in eg, GitHub. That being said, GitHub also exposes some of these details, for example: in PRs when you force push on your branch.

So in the general sense, there's no reason we can't have exactly what's being discussed, but it just doesn't exist yet.

> The reflog does exist on the server too, but it's not really accessible without access to the git repo on the server

Though it only logs refs that the server itself has seen, which is more or less what I meant by "local". None of its state is shared during push/pull, it's computed entirely based upon what some individual client/server directly observes.

Yes, as you say, I'd have to write the commit names down, and eventually they would get garbage collected.

You could tag, but then you are just polluting your tag namespace with old branches.

You can also search logs to recover a commit, besides the other ways mentioned.

> ok but then I lose it's nice handle.

Then don't delete the handle? Maybe rename it with a `deleted/` prefix?

It's hard to imagine what the expected behaviour is when branch names are just local convenience labels.