Re: Automagic `git checkout branchname` mysteriously fails

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 17, 2016, 11:39 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8A252mU8hgp2d+LQ8vku1w-sL9eP=t=G1AX61WJi8SUfA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACPiFCJFXGmsJX97kQuA2h3trVX7L3SacwKrD4mpEU5SPxkLAA@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 4:06 AM, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 4:58 PM, Kevin Daudt <me@ikke.info> wrote:
>> Correct, this only works when it's unambiguous what branch you actually
>> mean.
>
> That's not surprising, but there isn't a warning. IMHO, finding
> several branch matches is a strong indication that it'll be worth
> reporting to the user that the DWIM machinery got hits, but couldn't
> work it out.
>
> I get that process is not geared towards making a friendly msg easy,
> but we could print to stderr something like:
>
>  "branch" matches more than one candidate ref, cannot choose automatically.
>  If you mean to check out a branch, try git branch command.
>  If you mean to check out a file, use -- before the pathname to
>  disambiguate.

Or even better, list all ambiguous candidates like Jeff did for ambiguous short SHA-1 in 1ffa26c (get_short_sha1: list ambiguous objects on error - 2016-09-26).There were a few occasions I was confused by ambiguous refs and displaying them all would help me see what problem was much faster.

-- 
Duy