Re: Difficulties in advertising a new branch to git newbies

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Jan 31, 2007, 01:48 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701302042160.3021@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <20070130231015.GB10075@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Jeff King wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 12:13:26PM -0800, Carl Worth wrote:
> 
> > 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

Note that the latest revision on the master branch of git has a slightly less scary message.

> I don't see any reason why we can't scare the user when making a commit,
> instead of just checkout out to look around. Something like the patch
> below. It needs a few things:
>   - remove the old checkout message

I don't think that is a good idea in general.

It is already kind of a challenge to teach people about git's branch concept. The detached head is yet another exotic thing about git that is sure not to be really obvious to everyone. Now if you remove the message to hide the detached head state from the user just to come later on with a "hey btw did you know that your head was detached?" message then you can be assured that most people will simply go WTF.

Nicolas