Re: Inconsistent behavior of the path disambiguator

From: Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 29, 2010, 18:54 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTikc+pBe31j9tA88HwGz2kBouW_0S9oU6PtSQEzj@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vbp6c7ski.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

> I do not think there is any bug.  You were being bitten by folks who tried
> to be helpful for newbies by introducing a(n arguably confusing) special
> case; I can see why this is confusing, though.

Thanks.

We just switched to Git, and our developers got used to being able to just `git checkout branch` to create a local remote-tracking one for that remote branch.

Then we were bitten by a branch `foo` when path `./foo` existed.

I think the syntactic sugar needs to either be removed, or (preferably) be made consistent.

The current behavior is that if I try to checkout a branch that doesn't exist, but does exist on the remote, git creates a local remote tracking branch for the one I tried to check out.

It makes no sense IMHO for the disambiguating syntax to break that behavior, especially since in some cases, the disambiguating syntax is necessary.

Thanks, D