Re: Difficulties in advertising a new branch to git newbies

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Jan 31, 2007, 00:10 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701301853300.20138@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <87odognuhl.wl%cworth@cworth.org>

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Carl Worth wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Also, if I'm willing to assume (or insist) that users have git 1.5 or
> newer, it'd be nice to be able to drop the "-b build" thing thanks to
> the new detached HEAD support. But if I suggest doing just:
> 
> 		git checkout origin/proposed-fix
> 
> the user is presented with the following message which is much more
> scary than useful in this situation:
> 
> 	warning: you are not on ANY branch anymore.
> 	If you meant to create a new branch from the commit, you need -b to
> 	associate a new branch with the wanted checkout.  Example:
> 	  git checkout -b <new_branch_name> origin/proposed-fix

I think the warning should just be something where a user following your instructions will say, "ah, yes, that's actually what I want." Maybe:

  warning: you are now browsing the history without a local branch. You 
  will not be able to commit changes unless you create a new local branch 
  with "git checkout -b <new_branch_name>".

It's a bit silly for us to simply warn people that they're using this feature, rather than telling them what the potential downside is. Since it's marked as a warning, with no further information, the intuitive inference is that all sorts of bad things could happen (like, too many for us to list). At least we don't say "warning: your HEAD is now detatched" but still...

	-Daniel
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