Re: Bug: "git checkout -b" should be allowed in empty repo

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 6, 2012, 05:18 UTC
Message-ID: <20120206051834.GA5062@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vty34a6fd.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:15:34PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > I thought the concern wasn't confusion at the error message, but rather
> > "how do I start a new repository with a branch named something besides
> > 'master'?"
> >
> > You would expect:
> >
> >   git init
> >   git checkout -b foo
> >
> > to work, but it doesn't. And there's no easy way to do what you want
> > (you have to resort to plumbing to put the value in HEAD). So the issue
> > is not a bad error message or a confusing situation, but that the user
> > wants to accomplish X, and we don't provide a reasonable way to do it.
> 
> I think the right interface for "I want to use 'foo' instead of 'master'
> like everybody else" would be:
> 
> 	$ git init --some-option foo
> 
> I wouldn't have any issue with that.

Sure, that's one way to do it. But I don't see any point in not allowing "git checkout -b" to be another way of doing it. Is there some other use case for "git checkout -b" from an unborn branch? Or is there some harmful outcome that can come from doing so that we need to be protecting against? Am I missing something?

-Peff