Branch selection drop-downs should initially sort by activity
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Release notes
All branch selection drop-downs will now show most active branches at the top of the list
Problem to solve
When creating a new MR through the form, the branches dropdown shows an initial list of branches sorted alphabetically. On large projects this can be unhelpful and it instead makes sense to show branches sorted by activity instead (akin to the branches view breaking them down: gitlab-foss#17293 (closed)).
For example, the GitLab project has a lot of stale branches that the dropdown shows but would hardly ever be selected:
Making this initial list show active ones would make it more useful to users.
Proposal
All branch dropdown widgets, or at least the ones displayed on MR create/edit screens, should fetch the branches list in order of activity and show the most recent ones first.
Most recent activity is determined looking at latest commit on a given branch. The field that would contain this information is committed_date #338392 (comment 1225055275)
(This was requested by a premium customer: https://gitlab.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/230343)