From: Lars Hjemli <hjemli@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 19:55:53 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] checkout: allow full refnames for local branches
Message-ID: <8c5c35580705091255v2f85db3qcbf65904c278d17@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v8xbxu6u0.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On 5/9/07, Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
> "Lars Hjemli" <hjemli@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On 5/9/07, Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
> >> Lars Hjemli <hjemli@gmail.com> writes:
> >>
> >> > This teaches git-checkout to strip the prefix 'refs/heads/' from the
> >> > supplied <branch> argument
> >>
> >> Why is this necessary, may I ask?
> >>
> >
> > I'm playing around with a gui frontend, and there I use
> > git-for-each-ref to obtain possible arguments for git-checkout. That's
> > how I discovered the 'problem', and solved it by stripping
> > 'refs/heads/' in my frontend.
>
> Pathspec-less variant of "git checkout" takes two kinds of
> parameters and has two flavours in its behaviour:
>
>  (1) an exact branch name, in which case it switches to the
>      branch; otherwise
>
>  (2) any arbitrary commit object name, in whch case it checks
>      out and detaches HEAD.
>
> A tricky part is that an exact branch name is often a perfectly
> valid commit object name, so rule (1) trumps the rule (2).  You
> just discovered a way to have a detached HEAD at a commit that
> happens to be at an existing branch -- by naming that commit
> without using its exact branch name.

Ok. But if this is intended behaviour, maybe we would want do change
the detach-message in this case:

[~/src/git] next$ git checkout refs/heads/master
Note: moving to "refs/heads/master" which isn't a local branch

(sorry for stealing your time with this unimportant stuff, it just
surprised me that refs/heads/$branch wasn't treated as a local branch
name)

-- 
larsh