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Thanks! That's a very sensible model. I suppose it means that the status-check API can't be used to check that the history of a branch is up to some standards, like commit messages following a style or all commits in history passing some check, but that's fine. (It is a bit at odds with the documentation of the status-check API, which implies that it's about refs, not trees.)

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The API was originally about SHAs, rather than refs, but for protecting branches trees make sense. (You can retrieve statuses by ref, but are required to set them by SHA). Since a SHA can be uniquely resolved to a tree, we're doing this under the hood rather than make a breaking API change. It also just makes more sense; nobody thinks in terms of trees day-to-day.

Thanks for you comments about per-commit linting. We'll give them some thought.

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