On an Enterprise project I was on recently this was a real problem. With about 12 distinct and large (5-10 developers per team) all working on a single git repo, the lingering branches were out of control. They had built up over more than a year of abuse.<p>I think this issue is worth thinking about. For projects with a single owner or a small core set of contributors taking pull requests it is manageable. But when the responsibility is distributed, especially in the degenerate culture of Enterprise Java, uncontrolled branching can make git usage miserable.<p>The real problem was that we were using Git like an SVN server. But it was really interesting to see how bad it can be when branch pruning is not considered upfront.<p>Great feature github :)