Re: making a branch with just one file and keeping its whole history

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jul 21, 2008, 18:39 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0807211937390.8986@racer>
In-Reply-To: <279b37b20807211122w3a1e0687wc84693bd95689326@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Eric Raible wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Johannes Schindelin
> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Eric Raible wrote:
> >
> >> http://www.gitcasts.com/posts/empty-branches
> >
> > Beware!  This is one of the sites that triggered my mail about considering
> > teaching plumbing to new users harmful.
> >
> > In other words, I think that these "git casts" are not really the best way
> > to teach Git to new users, but rather confusing.
> >
> > Which is a pity, because they are nicely done otherwise.
> 
> I understand your concern, but if you treat that particular gitcast 
> simple as a recipe to be followed it accomplishes the goal in the in the 
> most straightforward way I've seen.

Note, I haven't even bothered to watch that Gitcast, since it would make me mad again.

> A new-user pure-porcelain way would be to branch then delete all of the 
> files in the branch.  Which seems a bit dirty to me.

This will not start a new branch, which is what I presume you want to do. The "correct" (as in: probably the best) way to do it is to make a new directory, initialize a new git repository in it, and when you have something, push that branch into the other repository.

However, I think that the OP was talking about something completely different: extracting the history of a single file as a new branch.

Ciao, Dscho