This is huge. We've wanted to use protected branches ever since they were announced but haven't been able to because we have hundreds of contributors merging to our primary branch every day.
This is great! We've been using protected branches with 100+ developers contributing and often face the out of date branch issue as our GIT implementors didn't realize this would be an issue until it was too late.
I can't wait for this to land in the enterprise edition. We go through some pretty convoluted steps to maintain branch protection while still allowing issues to be edited.
I want people to be able to merge via the Github PR flow, just not push directly without going through a PR. That doesn't seem possible from the blog post?
I want this too. It's possible to make it happen, but it's not easy like basic protection.
The protected branch behavior has two components to it. The primary protection is to prevent force-push to a branch, usually master. That one is a no-brainer.
The secondary behavior (AFAIK) is to enforce exactly what you are looking for, where you have to push to a branch before merging to master. The only way to make that happen is to integrate tests - if your branch passes tests, it can be merged. In my "copious free time" I plan to build a test hook that always reports "OK" so that I can enable that behavior on all of my repos, and it should end up as two or three clicks to set it up.
