Re: several quick questions

From: Josef Weidendorfer <josef.weidendorfer@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 14, 2006, 22:17 UTC
Message-ID: <200602142317.29626.Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <7v7j7xr54u.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Tuesday 14 February 2006 22:40, you wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Josef Weidendorfer <Josef.Weidendorfer@gmx.de> writes:
> 
> > Why not allow something like
> >
> > 	git-checkout master~5
> >
> > which implicitly does create a read-only branch "seek-point"?
> 
> Now what does "git-checkout branch" mean?  Does it switch to the
> branch, or does it force tip of seek-point to be the tip of
> branch and switch to seek-point branch?  More interestingly,
> what does "git-checkout seek-point" mean?

You are right; it would get quite confusing. But perhaps the current error message

  git checkout: you need to specify a new branch name

should be a little bit more explaining by appending

  "... to switch to for being able to checkout the requested revision"

> Having said that, I am not convinced in either way, though.

Me too. Specifying a branch name is easy enough.

Show 7 quoted lines

> > And git-commit should refuse to commit on a readonly ref, telling
> > the user to create a writable branch before with "git-branch new".
> 
> Now, read-only ref does not interest me, but "do not commit on
> top of this yourself, only fast-forward from somewhere else is
> allowed" may be useful, for the reason why you mentioned
> "origin".

Yes. The idea to make the ref readonly to specify this intent was a quick (not so good) idea.

Still, being able to specify that you can not commit on some branch (as you said) is very useful to prohibit doing things by accident. .git/config does not sound very good for such a thing, especially if there could be other branch-specific properties in the future.

Josef