I want to report a bug/anomaly in Git

Tony Sales· Jan 11, 2011, 22:22 UTC · lore

Hi, how do I report a bug/anomaly in git? I have looked on the git website and tried to ask on the git irc on freenode but couldn't post, even after requesting a 'voice'. The bug is that if you happen to create a new remote branch which shares it's name with an existing directory in the top level of the git repository, git then seems to get confused and the: git checkout <branch> - command doesn't switch to that branch or turn tracking on (and seems to think it was created from origin/<branch> rather than from refs/remotes/origin/<branch>), which it does if the branch doesn't share a name with an existing top level directory. This can be rectified by running: git checkout --track -b debian origin/debian - but this confused me for several hours and it was only because I had another repository with the same branch names, but different top level directories where the command worked that it finally dawned on me what the problem was. I then deleted the branch and created a new one with a differnt name and everything worked as expected.

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Jeff King· Jan 12, 2011, 18:35 UTC · re: Tony Sales · lore

Re: I want to report a bug/anomaly in Git

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 10:22:29PM +0000, Tony Sales wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> The bug is that if you happen to create a new remote branch which
> shares it's name with an existing directory in the top level of the
> git repository, git then seems to get confused and the: git checkout
> <branch> - command doesn't switch to that branch or turn tracking on
> (and seems to think it was created from origin/<branch> rather than
> from refs/remotes/origin/<branch>), which it does if the branch
> doesn't share a name with an existing top level directory. This can be
> rectified by running: git checkout --track -b debian origin/debian

I don't think this is a bug so much as a confusing application of too much DWIMmery in git-checkout. "git checkout foo" can mean several things:

  1. If it's a branch name, then switch to that branch.

  2. Otherwise, if it's a tag name, switch to a detached HEAD at that
     tag.

  3. Otherwise, if it's a file known to git, then checkout its content
     in the index into the working tree.

  4. Otherwise, if there is a remote branch that matches
     refs/remotes/*/foo, create a new branch "foo" that tracks it.

So the problem is that you expect behavior (4), but behavior (3) is getting in the way.

I assume it was written this way because (4) came much later, and therefore came last so as not to break existing behavior for the other cases. Conceptually, though, I think it makes more sense for it to come (3) (i.e., to keep all of the "checking out a ref" behavior together). And one can disambiguate the path-mode already by doing:

  git checkout -- debian

-Peff