Changes to branch management

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi all,

As the other thread has gotten a bit congested with various threads, I
thought I would split up the topics to make things a bit easier to
manage.

The first seems the least contentious: allowing all developers to
delete branches on our mainline repositories, except for certain
protected branches (like "master" and "KDE/*" for instance).

Any suggestions or variations on this?

Note: the protected branches really do need to be universal across all
repositories to be effective - otherwise the effort required to add
the protection will introduce an extremely high maintenance burden.

I'll also add that there is never a risk of work being lost courtesy
of the backup refs. The hooks automatically create these refs
(including the unix time of the event) whenever a destructive event is
made to a ref. The hooks will also explicitly prohibit any attempt to
alter the backup refs - they're read only and untouchable.

These can be manually fetched using "git fetch" if necessary to
restore a branch which is mistakenly deleted.

Thanks,
Ben