Re: [PATCH 2/2] git-checkout: improve error messages, detect ambiguities.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2008, 23:04 UTC
Message-ID: <7v7ibc9p93.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1216808133-31919-3-git-send-email-madcoder@debian.org>

Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> writes:

> The patch is twofold: it moves the option consistency checks just under
> the parse_options call so that it doesn't get in the way of the tree
> reference vs. pathspecs desambiguation.

I think this goes a bit too far.

Even if you have a file called 'master' tracked in your project, when you say:

    $ git checkout master

that's almost always branch switching. Forcing "git checkout master --" disambiguation for such a common case is simply a wrong thing to do from the usability point of view.

So how about (obviously we are interested only in the case without disambiguating '--' here):

    (3-1) if there is only one token left and if it is a rev, that's the
          branch to check out or commit to detach to.

    (3-2) otherwise the user might have mistyped one of the paths, so help
          avoiding by making sure the first token is unambiguously either
          a rev or a path (but not both).