Re: [PATCH v3 1/8] clone: teach --detach option

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 28, 2022, 21:40 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqmt9fhbjt.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <432bc7cb3a42cf39d0033701c2cc677c9109b3dd.1666988096.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

"Glen Choo via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> From: Glen Choo <chooglen@google.com>
>
> Teach "git clone" the "--detach" option, which leaves the cloned repo in
> detached HEAD (like "git checkout --detach"). In addition, if the clone
> is not bare, do not create the local branch pointed to by the remote's
> HEAD symref (bare clones always copy all remote branches directly to
> local branches, so the branch is still created in the bare case).
>
> This is especially useful in the "submodule.propagateBranches" workflow,
> where local submodule branches are named after the superproject's
> branches, so it makes no sense to create a local branch named after the
> submodule's remote's branch.

Wouldn't it the same thing to do "git clone -n && git checkout --detach"? If this is a pure implementation detail of another command and will never be used directly by end users, I am not sure if we should add a new option to do this.

Especially because it is probably not hard to perform internally an equivalent of "checkout --detach" without forking these days, judging from the fact that merges and rebases need to do so.