management/analysis/findings/F-006-stale-branches-publish-pre-rewrite-history.md

F-006: Three abandoned branches keep publishing exactly what the rewrite removed from main

category: dead-artifact confidence: high

evidence:

• axion1337.chat-gitops origin/turn-secret-rotation-20260728-192656: 41 commits not on main, head f30d2f5 dated 2026-07-28, not merged (git merge-base --is-ancestor -> no). All 41 carry real clock times (00h–01h and 21h–23h heavy). They are the pre-rewrite versions of commits the mapping table lists as replaced — 42 mapping rows resolve as ok-both-present in analysis/data/sha_refs.tsv, meaning the old SHA is still reachable.
• The same branch exists on the public mirror: git ls-remote https://rohana.axion1337.de/sorb/axion1337.chat-gitops.git -> f30d2f582ba14d85a7dec97c4db9bb2677ca824d refs/heads/turn-secret-rotation-20260728-192656, identical to git.lab.
• threadnet-call origin/livekit: 14 own commits with real clock times, head c12a4116 (2026-07-31 22:22), mirrored publicly with the same head.
• axion1337.chat-gitops origin/wiki: head 0ff598e, 2026-05-14. CLAUDE.md:63 already describes it as "ein überholter Mai-Abzug von docs/", and management#19 ("DOC-02: Veralteten wiki-Branch im gitops-Repo entfernen?") tracks it — open, priority:low, no status: label, i.e. plain backlog.
• The rotation branch's own successor mechanism is live: the scheduled CI job canonize_rotation exists at .gitlab-ci.yml:51 in the gitops repo, as CLAUDE.md:56-60 describes. The branch predates it and was never cleaned up.

impact: The single most expensive operation in this repo's history — a 251-commit rewrite that restarted three release pipelines and needed its own mapping document — is undone for 42 of those commits by a branch nobody looks at, on a host that is public. The wiki branch additionally offers a three-month-old copy of the documentation next to the current one, which is the "zwei Wahrheiten über dieselbe Sache" failure CLAUDE.md:94-97 names as worse than an incomplete one.

root-cause pattern: Artifacts outlive their purpose without an owner. All three branches served a finished purpose; none had a defined end. The one that is noticed (wiki) sits in the backlog without a status label, which is where low-priority hygiene goes to rest.

neckbeard mechanism: Gap in neckbeard. The framework governs files inside a checkout, not refs: nothing in AGENTS.md, WORKFLOW.md or scripts/validate.py sees a branch. The nearest existing mechanisms are WORKFLOW.md:122 (refinement item 2, "Backlog triage over docs/issues/") and WORKFLOW.md:126 (wiki lint, which hunts "orphan pages") — both would need a branch equivalent to catch this. schema.yaml's warn_if_orphan rule shows the framework already accepts "reachable from nowhere" as a reportable condition for documents; the field test shows refs need the same treatment.