My main issue with the described github-flow is that they push development branches to the server, and encourage that to be done very often.
And my issue with that is once you push something, it's off-limits to any kind of archaeology in the history. And that's not a "principle" thing. If you push your branch, do some rebasing and push again, you are in a world of hurt.
The operation will very likely fail, and recovery is a serious pain in the butt.
If you don't ever do any sort of archaeology, then that's great and it will work for you. I have had numerous occasions where I've tried some git merge or something and screwed things up. I've fixed it by putting my Indiana Jones hat on and digging in.
Being able to tamper with the history has gotten me out of trouble many times. The only time it has gotten me in to trouble is rewriting history that has been published.
And yet if you _don't_ push it to the server, then nobody else can see it. And don't you want other people to see develop branches to give feedback and even to collaborate on writing?
In practice, what everyone does is they DO rewrite history on those pushed dev branches, and they TRY to avoid the world of hurt by some convention for keeping track of what branches are 'development branches', and knowing that their history can change, and thus not _pulling_ from these branches into anything except a branch that does nothing but track the dev branch. And then using 'rebase' in just the right way on your local copy of that dev branch, when you need to. And then winding up in that world of hurt when something goes wrong.
Contrary to all the git apologists in this thread, i think it is one of the biggest usability problems with git. I'm not familiar enough with the other dcvs to know if they manage to do this better. I do know for all that, branching/merging is still a hell of a lot better than it was with svn.
What I myself tend to do is avoid ever rewriting history, sacrificing 'cleanness' for reliability and safety. Except when I'm working on a dev branch for an open source project where they insist upon it, and then I worry, and mess up a lot, and spend lots of time recovering from my mistakes.
