Your objection is predicated on the assumption that issues would need to be edited "for all time". That's not true for anything else in git, I'm not sure why that would be true for issues. I mean, if you had an "issues/" directory in your repo, and files named "issue1" "issue2" and so on, you would just edit the issue whenever. If someone made a branch for the issue, then they'd want to merge your edit into their branch ASAP - which is good, because it indicates that they read and understood the change. And this merge would be particularly painless since changes to "issues/" are absolutely not going to conflict with anything in "src/".