Re: Is it by design you can create a branch called 'HEAD'?

As you can see from the "warnings", we by design strongly discourage it, but just have been (and still are) lazy to think of a reason not to allow people who really want to do so, so the code is lenient if the user asks.

The plan behind these "warnings" obviously is that in future versions of git we would make them even stronger and eventually forbid perhaps all-caps names from anywhere inside refs/ hierarchy.