Re: [1.8.0] Summary of the discussions

From: Martin von Zweigbergk <martin.von.zweigbergk@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 18, 2011, 02:08 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1102172033340.14950@debian>
In-Reply-To: <7vwrky5f48.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>  * "git checkout refs/heads/<name>" checks out <name> branch.
> 
>     From: Martin von Zweigbergk <martin.von.zweigbergk@gmail.com>
>     Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 06:01:51 -0500 (EST)
>     Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.1102062234010.3788@debian>
> 
>     -- summary --
> 
>     In addition to "git checkout <name>" that names an existing branch,
>     special case "git checkout refs/heads/<name>" to check the branch out,

At first I was going to say that I don't think special casing it should be necessary. It seemed like as long as the name resolves to something like refs/heads/<name>, the branch should be checked out. Then I think I realized why you said to special case it. Since checkout favors branches to tags, we would first have to check if refs/heads/<arg> is valid and if it is not, check if the argument resolves to refs/heads/<name> (maybe ignoring tags called "heads/<name>").

Show 17 quoted lines

>     instead of detaching HEAD at the tip of the branch.  If you want to
>     detach at a specific commit and wanted to disambiguate <name> that is
>     both a branch and another ref by checking out refs/heads/<name>, your
>     workflow will be broken by this change, but you can still say
>     refs/heads/<name>^0 to work it around.
> 
>     -- comments --
> 
>     I do not think this backward incompatible breakage would seriously
>     hurt in practice, and if people see newbies are hurt by getting a
>     detached HEAD when they check out refs/heads/<name>, this proposal
>     might be an improvement, but I have a feeling that this may be trying
>     to solve a wrong problem.
> 
>     Why are these people _tempted_ to type refs/heads/ explicitly?  It
>     could be our tutorial or documentation.  That might be the thing to
>     fix.

It wasn't until recently that I learned that "git checkout [refs/]heads/<name>" (and rebase <upstream> [refs/]heads/name) detaches the head, so it wasn't really to try to help newbies that I proposed changing it. It was just that the current behavior is not what I think most people would expect.

/Martin