Re: [PATCH] git-bisect.sh: don't accidentally override existing branch "bisect"

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 2, 2008, 17:38 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8wysy5bz.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080502082232.GA20020@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>

Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On 2008-04-30 16:46:13 +0000, Gerrit Pape wrote:
>
>> If a branch named "bisect" or "new-bisect" already was created in
>> the repo by other means than git bisect, doing a git bisect used to
>> override the branch without a warning. Now if the branch "bisect" or
>> "new-bisect" already exists, and it was not created by git bisect
>> itself, git bisect start fails with an appropriate error message.
>> Additionally, if checking out a new bisect state fails due to a
>> merge problem, git bisect cleans up the temporary branch
>> "new-bisect".
>
> Makes me wonder why bisect has to use a branch at all, and not just a
> detached HEAD ... I seem to recall this having been discussed before,
> but I can't find it now.

Only because the mechanism predates detached HEAD and no other reason. Whoever wants to update it to use detached HEAD needs to design what should happen when the bisection was started while the HEAD is detached (should we come back to the same HEAD? how? ...), but other than that I do not offhand see fundamental difficulties.