Re: creating a new branch without an ancestor

From: Wesley J. Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net>
Date: Feb 5, 2010, 18:38 UTC
Message-ID: <80b2e7a2e4025acdad6e869fdeb9aab7.squirrel@webmail.icecavern.net>
In-Reply-To: <d2e97e801002041919r2043d05cjfb114a466605d9a1@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, February 4, 2010 20:19, Michael Wookey wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Maybe I'm missing something from reading the docs, but I couldn't see
> how to create a new branch in an existing repo that has no ancestor. I
> would like to do something like what git.git does with some of the
> other ancillary branches like "man", "html", and "todo".
>
> I was hoping to do something like "git branch --no-ancestor
> new-branch-name" but didn't see anything in the documentation that
> describes the necessary branch options.
>
> Or, am I looking in the wrong place?

I do this all the time for various reasons, so I made myself a "git-emptybranch" command and stuck it in my path. Besides the error checking, this just creates a new ref and clears the index so you can start from a clean slate. No actual files are deleted from the work-tree.

$ cat ~/bin/git-emptybranch
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
  2<&1
  echo "usage: git emptybranch <new_branch>"
  exit 1
fi

if ! git check-ref-format refs/heads/"$1"; then
  2<&1
  echo "fatal: '$1' is not a valid branch name."
  exit 1
fi

git symbolic-ref -m "git emptybranch $1" HEAD refs/heads/"$1" git rm --cached -r -q --ignore-unmatch -- '*'