Re: master^ is not a local branch -- huh?!?

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>
Date: Jan 29, 2010, 21:51 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1001291641200.1681@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <fabb9a1e1001291332w1d161f8at58aa6fe6908bd77f@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 29 Jan 2010, Sverre Rabbelier wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Heya,
> 
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 22:29, Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net> wrote:
> > Then who was arguing about making Git more user friendly rather
> > then less?
> 
> Using a detached head is a more advanced feature than wanting to
> checkout a remote branch locally, creating a local tracking branch. As
> such, 'git checkout origin/topic' now means the same as 'git checkout
> -t origin/topic', and you can get the old behavior back by doing 'git
> checkout origin/topic^0'.

What purpose does this "feature" serve? Making sure people remain stupid and get even more confused when the special dwimery doesn't work because they don't know the difference between a local branch and a remote tracking branch?

And now people will be left wondering why after a fetch they don't get the latest stuff when they do "git checkout topic" again. Is this any better?

> I don't see what the problem is, if you're
> using a detached head you're an advanced enough git user that you can
> remember that you can use '^0' to detach your head.

I don't agree with the assertion that a detached HEAD is for advanced users only.

> It's not all that uncommon to do 'git checkout HEAD^0' to detach your 
> head to the current branch, no?

Certainly way more uncommon than 'git checkout origin/foo', and way less intuitive.

Nicolas