That's very interesting, as someone who occasionally contributes to the odd Android fork. I kind of feel like repo is this weird semi-black box which does things I don't expect, like reverting my topic branches back to the remote branch but leaving the name in place (it does this if your topic branch does not have a remote tracking branch, and you run repo sync). I feel that at a minimum repo should play nice with standard git workflows. I should probably just read the repo source but I can't imagine why this behavior would be a good idea, and I'm usually left feeling like I would rather just use git directly than repo most of the time.