I can easily follow the history of long-deleted remote branches that I never had to begin with... you might need to pull it by ID instead of by name to get it locally, but you can still view the name, history, commits, diffs...
Again, that's not the same. Each commit in Fossil belongs to some branch, because its name and the fact of adding or removing a name is recorded directly in the commit artifact. In Git, branches are local references to commit (local in a sense that they are different for each repository instance, but can be synchronized). In Fossil, you can see which branch name the commit belongs to and if the parent commit had the same branch name or not; in Git branches are ephemeral entities which don't belong to commits, and once you delete the branch there's no way to know which name of the branch it belonged to.
i'm just not getting what you mean. if i delete a branch, i CAN still see the branch (and its name) the commits belonged to, even if i never had that branch locally.
i absolutely can, though. i went through this recently, trying to get back to a commit from nearly a year ago in a repo i'd never touched before.
the annoying part of getting it back was that you can't just do "checkout {name}" you have to do it by the SHA ID and then commit again by the original name, but before all that, you can 100% follow any since-deleted branch by its name. there's just a weird disconnect between viewing its history and having it directly in your hands again.
