[crbnw00ts]

You can already do this with git config, but unfortunately it's a giant hammer that affects the entire repo at once.

It is of course possible to write a post-receive hook that denies non-fastforward pushes to specific branches, but really, git should include a config option out of the box to do this at a more granular level. A common workflow is the expectation that people should be able force-push to their own topic branches all they like, but never to the default branch (except in extreme circumstances). Being able to easily set this via a config option would be very helpful in keeping working repos more "safe" from this kind of thing.

[jlgreco]

Ideally personal topic branches, not yet ready for world consumption, would be pushed but to a different repo. This would allow the main repo to have a global "No force pushes!" setting, and would prevent branch name collisions (how many developers have a scratch branch sitting around named 'scratch'?)

[crbnw00ts]

That's fine for some projects, but not every project follows that flow. One example: ompanies using GitHub Enterprise internally generally don't make every regular contributor to a project have their own fork (or at least they shouldn't, as it creates needless extra overhead). In that case, having some extra granularity around denying non-fastforward pushes to some branches but not others would be a helpful addition.