Seemingly inconsistent checkout behaviour

Dear People of Git,

I had some trouble getting out of a detached HEAD state using git checkout. I’ve solved it now but the behaviour of checkout when doing so leaves me a bit puzzled.

I’d expect the behaviour of the commands below to be equivalent:

   git checkout origin/main

vs

   git config checkout.defaultRemote origin
   git checkout main

But they are not; the former leaves the HEAD detached while the latter sets it to main. I failed to find an explanation in the git-checkout documentation, which seems to indicate that checkout always updates HEAD.

Could someone clarify what's going on?

A bit more elaborate transcript of what I did is below.

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards, Bart Kuster

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# Checkout a commit to get into detached HEAD state $ git checkout aac02b81d735d5f15b3b3c61a84ccb79a8a90145 HEAD is now at aac02b8 Merge branch 'main' of https://repo into main $ git checkout origin/main HEAD is now at aac02b8 Merge branch 'main' of https://repo into main $ git status HEAD detached at aac02b8 (...) $ git config checkout.defaultRemote origin $ git checkout main On branch main (...) $ git status On branch main $