From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 10:35:45 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/28] Use main as default branch name
Message-ID: <7df660f2-ad74-7d1f-eb13-a0edadffbfbf@iee.email>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqh7pmyuzn.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On 19/11/2020 01:51, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> writes:
>
>> An alternative in the other direction is to go with the 'not currently
>> on any branch' (detached at nowhere) but then require users to
>> deliberately create their first branch with their chosen name. This
>> moves the 'backward incompatibility' to a different place, which may be
>> easier to manage.
> As has already been mentioned by Peff, I do not think that is a
> workable alternative, especially given that people are generally
> afraid of and easily get confused by being on a detached HEAD.
Yes, our use of the technical phrase 'detached HEAD' is confusing,
compared with the more pleasant 'not on any branch', or 'not at a branch
tip'. Such is the curse of knowledge.
>
> And there is no such thing as unborn detached HEAD.  Existing
> versions of Git would not consider a $GIT_DIR that does not have any
> HEAD, which means a new repository created by such an "initially
> there is no branch" version of Git cannot be accessed by any
> existing versions of Git.
Isn't this, essentially, because there is no 'empty/null commit' that we
(HEAD) could start at? There have been a few cases where I've been
'annoyed' that we're missing that. (rather than the orphan branch approach)
>
> It raises the backward incompatibility of such an approach to a
> whole new level that is simply unmanageable, I am afraid.
OK, accepted.

Philip