Re: Bug: "git checkout -b" should be allowed in empty repo
- From
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
- Date
- Feb 6, 2012, 05:30 UTC
- Message-ID
- <7vk440a5qw.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
- In-Reply-To
- <20120206051834.GA5062@sigill.intra.peff.net>
Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
Show 5 quoted lines
> 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?
Mostly because it is wrong at the conceptual level to do so.
git checkout -b foo
is a short-hand for
git checkout -b foo HEAD
which is a short-hand for
git branch foo HEAD &&
git checkout fooBut the last one has no chance of working if you think about it, because "git branch foo $start" is a way to start a branch at $start and you need to have something to point at with refs/heads/foo.
So we are breaking the equivalence between these three only when HEAD points at an unborn branch.