Re: [PATCH 3/3] init: provide useful advice about init.defaultBranch

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 23, 2020, 18:40 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqv9dvor27.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.2011231326150.56@tvgsbejvaqbjf.bet>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

>> The above may give a valuable lesson to those who want to use one
>> branch name across new repositories, but it does not tell those who
>> wanted 'trunk' (to match the project, perhaps github.com/cli/cli,
>> with which they intend to interact) how to recover from having
>> already created the 'master' branch.  We may want to add some text
>> to suggest "branch -M" after giving the advice for the permanent
>> option.
>
> Good point.
>
>> Also, it is unclear to those who do not have a good <name> in mind
>> (or, those who do not care to choose a <name> for themselves), what
>> <name> they should give to take the "or to silence this warning"
>> part of the advice.
>
> Also a good point.

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> I came up with this, which I intend to submit with v2:
>
> static const char default_branch_name_advice[] = N_(
> "Using '%s' as the name for the initial branch. This name is subject\n"
> "to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all of your\n"
> "new repositories (or to suppress this warning), run:\n"

The same issue around "to suppress" is here, though.

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> "\n"
> "\tgit config --global init.defaultBranch <name>\n"
> "\n"
> "Common names are 'main', 'trunk' and 'development'. The initial branch\n"
> "can be renamed via this command:\n"
> "\n"
> "\tgit branch -m <name>\n"

It is very likely that the users are on an unborn branch when they see this message and "git branch -m/-M <name>" does not work. We'd probably want to update "git branch" to allow renaming the current branch that is unborn.

In the meantime, you could do "git checkout --orphan <name>" here, but once <name> exists as a branch that would not work, so...

> );
>
> Ciao,
> Dscho