I'm using git quite a lot these days, and really like it. It's branch management is just beautiful.

However, I want to lock branches once released. We announce to the team whenever we release something, but people make mistakes and accidentally add things to released branches.

Linus mentioned adding a very practical solution - letting me mark a branch as "readonly" in the .git/config file - but I don't think that really works I'd want to protect it in our central repository.

Could I just do something like make gitroot/thing/.git/refs/heads/version read-only? Anyone have any "best known method" for this?