> If you have write access to a bunch of repos, of course you can mess them all up, no github permissions will ultimately change that.
This is simply not the case. Force pushing is literally the only operation you can do via git protocols that have a destructive effect on the remote repo. Moreover, it is generally considered best a practice never to force push public branches. Thus, preventing forced pushes on branches that are considered public would, in fact, prevent any sort of real destruction to a repo. People could still push new garbage to it, but they can't make old history inaccessible.
Deleting a branch is also a destructive operation last time I checked. Force push could also be implemented by deleting the branch and pushing a different SHA1 into the same name.
Yes, that's true. Protecting a branch from deletion would be another nice feature and could be tied to denying forced pushes. Both can be construed as the branch being "public".
Disabling force push is a hack. Git does not track branch history, that a branch points to something that can somehow be merged to a branch you have is formalized nowhere. Branches don't have hashes, they're just strings that point to commits.
You make it sound like force pushing is some sort of special operation, but it's actually just the same operation that's made with every commit. A branch is deleted, and then a new branch is made with that same name pointing to a new commit. It's just that with a normal push there's a check to see if there's a path from the previous HEAD to the new HEAD.
And another thing, it's also not directly destructive, the unreferenced commits don't immediately disappear. They just get cleaned up when git decides it's time for garbage removal. You can still check the commits out, if you know their sha.
This is simply not the case. Force pushing is literally the only operation you can do via git protocols that have a destructive effect on the remote repo. Moreover, it is generally considered best a practice never to force push public branches. Thus, preventing forced pushes on branches that are considered public would, in fact, prevent any sort of real destruction to a repo. People could still push new garbage to it, but they can't make old history inaccessible.