ok, I understand that argument.

On the other hand: JGit is writing these files! If we write them we should allow applications to read them from us. If for example an IDE integration like EGit wants to show all available refs to their end-users should it really hard-code this list of MERGE_HEAD, ORIG_HEAD, FETCH_HEAD?
If this would be strange internal refs with no real-world use case I can understand. But an EGit user might really want to compare to ORIG_HEAD or to fetch a change from gerrit and then rebase current branch on FETCH_HEAD.
Whats about having an option to getRefs() telling to report also these special refs.