Git Subtree Merges, Orphaned Branches, and GitHub

Git supports a merge strategy called the subtree merge which brings a branch into a subdirectory of another branch. This can be used as an alternative to submodules: add a remote, create a remote tracking branch, and use git read-tree to import that branch into a subdirectory of your main project. The remote tracking branch mirrors the external project in your own repository, and shares no ancestors with your main branch.

If it's not possible to track the dependency as a git repository, you can manually create an orphaned branch that shares no ancestors with your main project:

git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/newbranch
rm .git/index
git clean -fdx
<do work>
git add your files
git commit -m 'Initial commit'

Orphan Branches in GitHub

So, what does GitHub think of these orphaned branches? Here's a project that has two unrelated branches:

If we fork the project and make commits to these branches, we can see the game of hopscotch that ensues. Adding to master:

Adding to the orphan branch:

This is a bit cluttered, so let's look at that last one again without the labels:

Additional commits in the original repository work as expected, but I imagine the network graph gets pretty confusing after a while: