From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:00:58 GMT
Subject: Re: Status after 'git clone --no-checkout' ?
Message-ID: <20111201190058.GC2873@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <jb59h0$p3e$1@dough.gmane.org>

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 02:02:22PM +0100, norbert.nemec wrote:

> what exactly is the status after 'git clone --no-checkout'? Is there
> any straightforward way how one could end up in this state starting
> from a regularly checked out repository?

You have a HEAD which points to some actual commit, but no index or
working tree. I don't think there is a particular name for this state.

You can get something similar in an existing repo by deleting all of the
working tree files and removing .git/index.

> 'git checkout' without any further options serves to move from the
> aforementioned special state to a regular checked out state.
> Otherwise it never seems to do anything. Are there any other
> situations where 'git checkout' on its own would have any effect?

By itself, I don't think so. But you can use "git checkout -f" to
discard changes in the index and working tree, setting them back to the
state in HEAD.

At one point, some people used "git checkout" as a no-op, because it
would print the "ahead/behind" information with respect to the upstream.
These days, that information is part of "git status", so I suspect
people use that instead.

-Peff