Re: Difficulties in advertising a new branch to git newbies

> On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > 
> > > On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> > > 
> > > >   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>".
> > > 
> > > This isn't true.  You can commit on top of a detached head.  In fact you 
> > > can do almost anything.
> > 
> > "Commits you make will not be attached to permanent state unless you 
> > create a local branch"? I'm not sure how the feature turned out to work, 
> > but I know that (a) you're fine if you don't make any commits and (b) the 
> > behavior is more like what happens with anonymous checkouts of other 
> > people's repositories in non-distributed SCMs, so people will tend to
> > underestimate what they can do with this, rather than overestimating it 
> > and getting into trouble.
> > 
> > I suppose it's reasonable to warn at commit time, if we ended up going 
> > with allowing commits like normal.
> 
> I disagree.
> 
> It is not the commit which is dangerous when the head is detached.  It 
> is the checkout of another branch.  And this case is covered already 
> such that the checkout is refused unless you actually create a branch 
> for your detached head or you give -f to checkout to override the 
> protection.
> 
> Giving a warning at commit time is not the place where the user has to 
> be aware of the issue since it is indeed not the place where there is 
> any issue to worry about.