Re: Bootstrapping into git, commit gripes at me

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 12, 2005, 00:57 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507111646000.17536@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vll4dndwu.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> 
>  - we allow git-checkout-script with a tag; I think we store the tag
>    object without dereferencing in .git/HEAD;

No, git-checkout-script _shouldn't_ have done that. It will do the read-tree on the tag (which will do the right thing), but it won't change the HEAD itself.

But I think Marc has/had an older git-checkout-script. The original one didn't do branches at all, and indeed just blindly wrote its result into .git/HEAD.

> My current preference is to keep .git/refs/heads tag free.  At
> least, I do not think we should ever write non commits to
> .git/*_HEAD.

And we don't. Not any more.

However, right now we don't update .git/HEAD at _all_ unless we checked out a specific branch. Part of that is that we don't really know what we should change. Should we reset the current branch to that tag? Should we switch to the "master" branch, and switch _that_ to that tag? Should we create a totally new branch for just this thing?

Creating a new branch ends up being the only _safe_ option, but what should we choose as the branch name?

		Linus